


Forty-Proof and Frozen Veg

by tvsn



Series: H+S [2]
Category: Turn (TV 2014)
Genre: (fr)enemies to lovers, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, M/M, Not Serious, mostly bants, very short affair
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-07
Updated: 2017-10-02
Packaged: 2018-12-12 08:23:02
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 7
Words: 28,218
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11733264
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tvsn/pseuds/tvsn
Summary: Simcoe and Hewlett banter about politics, psychology, the pub, porn, Pogba and what constitutes proper medical treatment when one’s insurance deductible is so high.…then they get buzzed watching an international friendly, snog for around eighteen minutes and ultimately … get over it (and themselves.)Or do they …?





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> I mean, either you know what I am about and what you are in for or you will soon find yourself severely disappointed.

John Graves Simcoe had been having as pleasant of a morning as one possibly could whilst half-neglecting a festering wound; that was, until, he’d heard over the monitor’s moans the sound of the spare key opening the front door to his flat. He had clearly bestowed it upon the wrong man. Edmund Hewlett was a full hour early and had either brought with him or found upon arrival the sort of self-righteousness that manifested itself in hyperbole.

“You need to go to hospital,” Hewlett insisted for what seemed the hundredth time that morning, though in truth it was merely the sixth. ‘Need’ was too strong of a sentiment for Simcoe’s liking. ‘Need’ implied that he was not doing a proper job of sorting what he personally considered to be a small cut all on his own. He glanced over at the laptop hooked up to his large screen television, the actors’ faces twisted into pained, hateful moues – possibly at having their own orgasms put on pause.

When he looked back at Hewlett, he saw the Scot was frowning as well. Disapprovingly. As he might expect.

There was truly no accounting for taste.

Hewlett’s eyes shifted between him and the man suspended in pleasure whom Simcoe had been pretending to be for the better part of the morning. The fine lines that had come to distinguish and define the face of the man whom he paradoxically considered his oldest friend and most bitter adversary sharpened substantially with each second that passed in silence. He considered restarting the video, if only to let himself reflect on how well he had aged by comparison. Hewlett’s lower lip fell slowly to show a heavy row of teeth that had always somehow reminded Simcoe of an antidote he had once heard and often repeated involving a horse, a bullet and the man before him. He smiled, seeing Hewlett reveal his hypocrisy in his attempt to revile.

Most men, he reasoned, processed the sort of psychological instability that forced them to cower to the judgement of others. Hewlett did not simple rattle this sabre - he stabbed, wounded and slayed in the form of a near-constant cold stare. Simcoe often watched in wonder as he saw scores surrender and offer spoils with which to show that they too could be moral, intelligent, or whatever other standard Hewlett sought to inspire in those he thought himself superior to. Sought to seem himself through the simple act of scrutiny.

Hewlett’s preferred tactic had never worked on him personally, and nor would it, Simcoe stated calmly as he watched a shutter run the length of his sometimes-friend’s spine, revealing in its shake just how soft the colonies had made him both mentally and physically. “What, pray tell, are you on about?” he scoffed, but Simcoe only smirked, debating if it would weaken his amusement if he were to offer insight into which aspect of Hewlett’s person he found most revolting. He expected the shorter man to take a step back, but he didn’t.

“John? I can drive you, should that be an issue.”

Oh, he thought. To hospital. When would he lay off?

“I have the matter well under control, I assure you,” Simcoe piped in return.

“I’m assured of nothing. Get dressed.”

“If this if your way of apologising, I dare say you are off base,” Simcoe said as he held up the bag of peas he had been clutching to his chest. “I don’t imagine that there exist a single ailment that can’t be sorted with a bag or frozen veg or a shot of something forty-proof.”

“I almost died of hypothermia the weekend before last,” Mr Ed retorted through the thick teeth he held shut to punctuate a scowl. There was no part of his half-given accusation that was not exaggeratory. Simcoe wondered if it was actually possible to mistake mild discomfort for demise.

“I beg to differ; alcohol is known to have a warming effect,” he smiled.

Hewlett rubbed his temples as he explained that alcohol was a vasodilator, that heat was not being created, but rather dangerously redistributed from one’s core to one’s periphery. He used words like this because he thought they made him sound sophisticated. Simcoe interrupted what he fear would become a winding lecture on topics he had little interest in to remind Hewlett that he had come over planning to get pissed on some cheap American imitation of beer with a chap he had found with his hand down his trousers upon entry. That it was a little after nine in the morning. That it was a Tuesday. That he was not half as elegant, moral and high-minded as he expected others to pretend.

This threw him. Hewlett stuttered as he tried to retort. “Ah- yes.. Yes well, I ah, rather anticipated that we would be watching sport and not this BSDM nonsense,” he swallowed.

Simcoe restarted the film and fell back onto his sofa. “I was wondering how long it would take you to ask.”

“I hardly -”

“No. You saw and sought to judge as you are so keen to. But I warn you, Edmund, I’ll not tolerate the integrity of Lady Lola or her art insulted in my presence.”

“Christ she has a name,” Hewlett muttered, his shoulders falling into a slouch.

“Of course she has a name. She likely has student debt and daddy issues too, but unlike some,” he smiled, “she has more than made the best of her situation. And of mine.”

“I’m not watching porn with you, mate,” Hewlett said, unable to divide his eyes from the screen. He took a seat on the edge of the couch cushion, his knees knocking against the clutter-filled coffee table, determined to afford himself as little comfort as possible.

Lady Lola rode her screaming lover, carving her name into his breast with a serrated blade. He struggled in vain to free himself from the ties which bound his hands to a pole behind him. For a moment Simcoe became that man and Lola the beer maid from the tavern from which he was now barred. He felt the ten-day old sting of Hewlett’s butter knife as it again found his chest, the wound opening once more as he took a too-deep breath, trying to close his throat in order to keep any involuntary sounds of enjoyment to himself. He wished his friend would take this as an excuse to leave for a cigarette. Or forever. Whichever suited.

“Christ,” Hewlett repeated, as though he thought reminding Simcoe of the Lord to whom he prayed would do much in the way of making him stop the video before Lola gagged the man he wished he was as he tried to speak their pre-arranged safety word. Simcoe loved that part. Hewlett continued to speak.

“You say this as if you’ve not forced me into watching your hentai shite, ye sick cunt,” Simcoe interrupted, hoping that would bring an end to whatever his mate was on about.

“My -” Hewlett swallowed, searching his memory. “Why, I never – wait. You can’t possibly mean … _Waltz with Bashir_?” he squinted.

“You know the names of the characters in your choice pornography yet you fault me for knowing Lola. Look. It is written there in blood.” Suddenly it said Anna, but this, Simcoe thought, was better kept to himself.

“Simcoe … that, that wasn’t hentai, that - not to seem pedantic but that wasn’t even anime, it is an award winning Israeli animated war documentary about – my God. My God!” he choked on the offence he had taken. “You … you really get off on, on violence, don’t you?”

“No, I usually have a dominatrix on the telly mornings with my hand round me cock just for a bit of ambiance,” Simcoe replied softly. “You ought to knock next time to announce yourself.”

Hewlett did not seem to hear him.

“And you think that I – that I, watching carnage, I, I’d truly-“

Simcoe wondered if he had yet given his friend a nervous twitch. He smiled sardonically as he turned up the volume. “I don’t think you get off at all, and if you must know,” he said. “I think that is your problem.”

“I’m not, no. We’re not doing this,” Hewlett said as in a single motion he rose and turned dramatically on his heel. To Simcoe’s disappointment he then announced in hard tones that he meant to make use of the alcohol he had been told was in the refrigerator, and did he perhaps want anything as well?

“Newkie,” Simcoe shouted after him. “And get the Aquavit from the ice box. And peas.”

“I’m ringing a doctor,” Hewlett threatened, insinuating through another meaningless phrase that Simcoe’s take on modern medicine did not fit his standards.

“What doctor?” Simcoe asked. They knew but two between them, he argued, neither of whom would prove helpful in a situation he clearly already had under control. “Wakefield will just ask you to ring him back at half time with the score and not to sound as though I truly count him, but Andre -” he stopped.

The two men had become reacquainted in the waiting room of the psychologist Simcoe was forced to see due to a court order. Hewlett, for his part, probably went willingly, liking when others acknowledged the miseries he spent a decent amount of time inventing for himself. “No, actually, give ol’ Johnny a ring. Tell him where you are and what we are doing. He’ll get a rise out of it, I am quite certain,” Simcoe piqued.

Andre was keen on advising the two of them that they might make efforts to spend no more time together than their commitments to the association-football team for which they both played demanded while simultaneously makaing his receptionist schedule their appointments back-to-back. Once Simcoe had thought to question this and was told that together they comprised the worst part of the doctor's workweek and he thought wise to compress the torment to a single morning. He had then gone on to state that he would have trouble remembering the name ‘Edmund Hewlett’ were Simcoe not to repeat it whenever he elected to speak. Simcoe had wondered if Andre had been drunk at the time and if there were truly people who did not spend a decent percentage of their days conspiring against the man criticizing him at present.

It seemed unrealistic.

“You said you bought cider for me,” Hewlett shouted.

“Ask yourself Edmund, does that truly sound like something I could ever bring myself to do? Purchase cider when there is beer on the market. Honestly. What sort of a monster do you take me for?”

“I almost died last week,” Hewlett said again as though that would make it true.

“Accepting that you take this blatant lie you seem to have convinced yourself of as truth, are you attempting to attribute me with blame? Guilt?” Simcoe asked. “Listen mate, I never anticipated that you would leave yourself … so exposed, out in the chill of – what did we have? Fourteen degrees at night? Which is what in imperial? Fifty-seven? My, put into those terms it seems impossible that you stand before me now.”

“I have a heart condition. You know that.”

Simcoe felt his own heart stop.

He did know. He did not think. It had not, at least, been at the forefront of his mind or factored into his decision making on the fateful night in question. For a moment he considered the possibility that Hewlett well could have died in the whole campaign, and that this would hardly serve his interest of torturing the man just enough that he would return to fight another round in their ongoing conflict. It was the only thing either of them really had going for them at all, which, while dually acknowledged, was difficult to admit.

He turned and watched Hewlett free the bottles of ale from their lids, take the liquor from the freezer and ignore the rest of the requested first-aid kit. Simcoe imagined him getting lost in the woods with only that fleece blanket he had stolen for cover. He imagined a police search going on for weeks, months - finding his corpse in the spring when the last of the winter snows had melted. He reasoned that owing to proximity, he would probably have been tasked with flying back with the body. He wondered if it would appear on the conveyer belt at Heathrow with regular luggage, if he would have to shove aside American tourists as he ran after the rotting carcass. He wondered if his own name would appear on the death note hanging from a frost bitten toe for the purposes of baggage claim. If Hewlett would have instead been cremated beforehand and if he could have brought his old friend as a carry on. But would the TSA have allowed it? Would there have been enough room amongst Hewlett’s remains for his laptop in the event that the in-flight film was not to his liking? For a moment, these considerations plagued Simcoe. For a moment, they threated to make him sad.

“And now you have sick leave from work and don’t have to phone in with an excuse to stay home and watch the match. And I’m still bleeding from where you stabbed me,” he said. This was the proper way to express regret, he reasoned, without a hint of mercy. Hewlett deserved nothing short of the highest standards.

“I’m sorry, you’re _bleeding_? Christ. I was under the impression it was merely swollen – which, mind, would be cause for concern in itself,” Hewlett blistered as he hastened back to the sofa he suddenly insisted on treating as a sickbed. “Let me see,” he demanded.

Simcoe lifted his shirt to his breast to reveal the cut. Lola strangled her lover as he attempted to beg for a kindness she would not grant until she came.

“Can we turn this off?”

“I like this part.”

The Englishman explained that he had woken up that morning with an open sore and, in fitting with what he took was proper medical procedure in this strange land, had phoned his employer to let them know he could not make it into the office and set about taking care of his immidiate needs.

“You need to go to hospital.”

There were those words again. That judgemental tone. Simcoe had had quite enough. Meanly, he yanked the undershirt he had slept in back down to his waist. What he ‘needed’ was for his foe to leave until the friendly started. Reasoning that this would be a very rude thing to say in itself since he had extended the invitation, he asked about Hewlett’s own approach to health care, hoping he would take a hint. “When you go to Andre you actually let him trick you into talking about your mundane existence until he has you convinced that you have problems that can only be smoothed over by a heavy dosage of benzodiazepine, don’t you?”

“Ah -”

“How is that working out for you, Oyster? No, no. Let me answer. Not bloody well. Not lately. You stabbed an unarmed man during a beer pong tournament – your team mate no less! – over a horse that died because you put a bullet into its skull, what? Fifteen years ago now? You nearly lost your housing this past September after brandishing an antique weapon from the drawing room mantel at your landlord’s son whilst he held his toddler -”

“That is not remotely -”

He clearly had so terribly much to teach his lad about the art of conversation.

“This is the only nice thing I am likely to say to you all morning, what with it being an England test match and all, so do try not to interrupt,” Simcoe snipped. “I truly don’t consider that there is anything wrong with you. Being an introvert is not a character flaw, nor is fighting back when you are attacked or when the mood just … strikes,” he squinted. “Your problem is that you let so-said professionals talk you into believing that your ‘feelings’ warrant discussion. Andre is really into that Freudian shite and probably references Greek myth in your sessions and you – oh I imagine you devour it, not because you give a damn about your mental health but because you rather fancy yourself some tragic hero or another and enjoy the analogy.”

“You really think that is true?” Hewlett puzzled.

“No. Of course not. You know I think psychology is bullocks. I just made up everything I just said as does everyone in that field. What you ought to do, what I do myself is go in for the appointment - I pick something off of Andre's desk at random and play with it until he writes a prescription if only to get me to leave. I know I don’t need to be there -”

“Oh, I’d beg to differ.”

Some of the concern had left Hewlett’s voice to make place for the chastisement Simcoe had come to almost cherish after nearly two decades of casual animosity. As long as he could get Hewlett to cease speaking about needs and hospitals, he would consider the day won.

“I get more emotional satisfaction from watching BSDM videos online each morning than from anything I am told I should be doing. I get all that I need. It is _therapeutic_ , Edmund. It is _healing_. So, returning to my point, no. I am not turning it off the telly until Lola here finishes herself off and I am certainly not going to hospital, but you, old friend, are free to leave at your digression.”

“Where I can understand how a quality wank might make you a bit less of a violent, insufferable twat,” Hewlett spat, “you are really going to have to explain the logic behind how you think it is going to help with a week-old cut you can’t get to close.”

“Oh it’s not, but it helps with the fantasy element. For the cut itself I have the veg and liquor.”

“I’m … speechless.”

“You? Never.”

Hewlett rubbed his temples. For a blessed moment, it seemed as though for the first time in his life he had managed to use a word and then demonstrate that he, in fact, understood its meaning.

Lola dug her nails into the man’s open sores.  Simcoe inhaled sharply. Hewlett spoke.

“Take off your shirt.”

At this, Simcoe turned and stared until such time as he had given up on trying to make Hewlett flinch. He complied with the request without further resistance. Hewlett then pressed the skin around the wound asking if it hurt which Simcoe answered no but privately allowed that it rather did. Hewlett’s fingertips felt colder than the flash-frozen vegetable. The way they lingered, however, was oddly warming.

“You know how DeJong’s has not had a sink in the gent’s for four months?"

"Sure."

"Once, ah ... recently in fact, I thought to ask Anna Strong if I might use the one in the kitchen or behind the bar to wash my hands. She offered me some hand sanitizer she had in her purse. I asked again. Turns out, they don’t have hot water, and thus no sanitary means of washing their cutlery. The knife that I stabbed you with is likely to have been crawling with disease.”

Again, Hewlett was giving into his dramatic disposition in a situation that hardly warrented it.

Simcoe knew that Anna boiled water with which to clean and wash throughout the night on the stove and in an electric kettle he had ordered for her when she refused his offer to pay to have the pipes fixed. He would let Hewlett continue to worry about health code violations if they kept him from visiting the establishment on his own accord. Needs must.

Anna had once told him that she considered Edmund twice the man that he was when they were alone in the bar and he was beating her at darts, something which Simcoe still had troubles intellectually processing – what game exactly had she been trying to throw with that rude remark? It was of no matter; soon she would be divorced and he would win her hand when he saw it free. He had too. He had already written Ban, Effie, and all of the other friends he left back across the Atlantic that he planned to propose. And then he would know the sensation of her delicate fingers caressing wounds she had inflicted in the act and he would have no more use of Lola’s laughter or Hewlett’s - whatever it was that Hewlett thought his hands had any place doing.

It was growing tedious.

As was the conversation.

“And I dare say this is defiantly infected. You need to have it treated before it spreads. You likely need a tetanus shot."

"Try again?"

"Ah … would it - might it help if I were to say ah -‘I’m sorry.’” It sounded pained as it well ought.

“Your conscious, perhaps,” Simcoe mocked. “But it wouldn’t help with my five-thousand-dollar deductible and it would do nothing to get me to hospital.”

“John,” Hewlett said flatly.

“Don’t pretend you wouldn’t be willing to die for principle.”

This upset him and he made small noises that caused Simcoe to stiffen. He fixated again on the telly, hoping the porn to save him from thoughts of sex before they became feelings of shame, or at least offer a plausible defence for something he could not define should Hewlett ask or should he afford the strange, sudden boner any further consideration. Hewlet, however, was too concentrated to take note, his tongue unconsciously pressed between his lips. He still had his hand on Simcoe's chest, picking out the small fibres from the thread Simcoe had attempted to use to stich himself up.

“Alright,” he at last relented. “You seek to heal yourself through pain? Let’s. I’m going to go out for a fag, you do … whatever it is you need to do to calm your nerves and we will convene in the kitchen in a few minutes to cauterize the wound.”

John Graves Simcoe blinked for what he would have concluded must have been the fifth time in his life were he counting.

“Of all of the weaklings I have turned into warriors," he said with respect, "you are my greatest creation.”

Hewlett sighed. He then took a sip of liquor from the bottle, which was either a poorly attempted power play for he flinched as he swallowed, or rather, something he hoped would numb him to the pain he had designs on inflicting. As ever, Hewlett was being histrionic, but Simcoe was curious to see just how far he was willing to take this. He gave a slight nod of consent.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Simcoe is confronted with the reality that no one wants him around, turns it into an argument, and comes on the nauseating thought that there might be something inevitable to Hewlett and himself.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is rather fluffy for me, which is to say it is fluffy in the sense of a Fiberglas batt. I’m fronting. I can be nice. What I cannot seem to avoid however is being longwinded, and it seems I have a WIP on my hands. Oops.
> 
> That in mind, I do this thing where I warn about chapter specific triggers in my other works before each chapter, so here I hit you with: exclusion, recreational drug use, light suggestions at sadistic and otherwise sexual themes. 
> 
> Hope you enjoy!

Peeved at the silence, John Graves Simcoe moved the curser around the screen, certain that the server had frozen. Hewlett let out a little snort of indigence, shaking his head slightly as he told him to close the programme, reopen it and try again.

“Is that what you teach your undergrads?” Simcoe asked as lifted his hands in deference to Hewlett’s self-supposed expertise.

“Not touching your laptop, mate,” the Scotsman sneered. He smelt of ash, of the way certain sorts of smoke lingered in the air when the world began to chill, of cold itself. It reminded him of Glasgow, of the night Hewlett had given him his first fag and the night which they spent together in the same city before that. Years before. He wished for the cigarette he could now taste on the other man’s breath as he spoke, as he began to wonder if Hewlett ever thought about the things of which they simply did not speak. Knowing that his sometimes-friend was not otherwise a habitual chain smoker, he wondered what other vices must fill the void that city left and whether or not they resembled his own.

They must, Simcoe decided, to some extent at least. After all, they were waiting on a teammate of theirs to instruct them in how best to stab at an open wound. This brought a smirk to his lips. Through himself a casualty of his own crusade, the scar he would forever bear felt almost a victory. It proved to him that the boy he had spent half a lifetime wanting to both be and best still existed somewhere in anger and alcohol if not in Hewlett directly.

The stab wound that failed to scab, however, stung with defeat.

Simcoe moved the curser again.

“Don’t be shy. Not as though I could well finish what with you hanging about.”

Hewlett pressed his lips together to halt something doubtlessly unkind from escaping them. The man on the twelve-inch screen cleared his throat.

“If you are asking for my professional opinion,” Wakefield said at last, seemingly dismayed by either their predicament or the question it had raised, “Simcoe, the reason why your premium and deductible are so high has less to do with your salary than it has to do with,” he paused, throwing up his hands as though he meant to surrender. “Forgive me, Captain – you were stabbed in a bar fight, and rather than seek immediate medical attention, you opted to pour hard liquor into the cut and stitch it up yourself, and now, after ten days of what I imagine to be torment, you plan to have your assailant cauterize the wound in your kitchen? I think you must be feverish to the point of delusion and had rather ought to check yourself into hospital.”

“See,” said Hewlett as though this settled things. As though a second opinion somehow washed him of this sin.

Simcoe calmly stated that Wakefield was a product of the industry he worked in. The centre back in the Sunday League football team he captained was a paediatrician – a word that he personally had always understood as having something to do with feet and Hewlett understood as a branch of medicine concerned with infants and children. This, in turn, caused Simcoe to question aloud if Hewlett truly had an A level in Ancient Greek and, of more immediate interest, why he thought calling their foot-doctor friend over Skype was even necessary. They could just as well have googled how to perform the procedure and have had the matter sorted by now. Hewlett called it a precaution. Simcoe called him a coward. Wakefield looked ready to call it a day, advising again as he moved to disconnect the call that Simcoe had instead ought to visit an emergency room.

Simcoe called him out once more on his clear bias and intent.

Wakefield, he said, was just trying to get him to invest more than the law required him to in a system designed on creating widespread financial ruin in a recovering economy by making him believe that it was at all necessary. Hewlett had clearly been fool enough for this lie to have found purchase, but as Simcoe reiterated, he personally kept a bag of peas and a bottle of something Scandinavian on hand, not to mention a friend who had already proven himself fit for violent acts should the situation demand it. He had it more than under control.

“Wait,” Hewlett begged of the doctor. He reached his hand to Simcoe’s forehead to check his temperature. His fingertips were cold to the touch as a result of standing out in the mid-November air for ten minutes with a cigarette that smelled like ten and a multitude of regrets he had sought to conceal from his active mind with a cloud of smoke. “Ah, perhaps I might, ah - that is if -” he started, suddenly looking far sicker than Simcoe felt.

“You were outside. Here,” he felt his own brow to appease them. Nothing abnormal. He stared at Wakefield with wide eyes awaiting either further criticism or another sales pitch. His eyes expanded when he felt Hewlett’s thin, dry lips kiss the place his hand had just been. Simcoe’s hard stare faltered.

“He seems alright, ah, in that respect, I mean that is to say – he hasn’t a fever insofar as I can tell,” Hewlett asserted. Simcoe, for his part, was stunned. He looked at Hewlett to provide an explanation for his action but none was forthcoming.

“The cut still appears to be infected,” Wakefield said with little interest.

“It could well be,” Simcoe defended, “but it is not as though going to hospital is an option. My insurance carrier would either not cover the claim or would simply raise my premium next year were I not to file a police report, which I refuse to do. Whatever else you may think me, gentlemen, I’ll not be labelled a hypocrite. Oyster and I got into a row. He wound up with moderate hypothermia … the effects from which he still seems to be suffering; he stabbed me in retaliation-”

“In self-defence,” Hewlett interjected as though it made a difference.

“Either way,” Simcoe continued, “It’s just lads being lads ‘innit?” With this, he shifted meanly to the man beside him, “as is, you’ll have a difficult enough time finding employment after you finish your doctorate without having an assault charge to your record. Might want to trust me on this.”

“T-thank you?” Hewlett puzzled.

“Lads being lads? It is attempted homicide,” Wakefield returned. “All of it. Every. Bloody. Week. But I’ll give you that I’ve watched you both try to hurt each other in far more doltish ways and for dumber reasons than what you now suggest,” he closed his eyes and continued. “It will stop the bleeding but, contrary to myth, cauterization will do nothing against infection, you’ll need a round of antibiotics which by the looks of it you’d really ought to be on anyway.”

“Could I perhaps then trouble you to -” Hewlett started.

“I can’t legally write a prescription for an unofficial patient, but I can pass on some samples pharmaceutical reps are always sending the office.”

“Splendid,” Simcoe peeped. “Then how do we do the rest of this proper?”

“I have a terrible suspicion that you are genuinely looking forward to this,” Hewlett hissed - judgemental and indignant, as were his expected norms.

“Not nearly as much as I look forward to seeing if you flinch and fuss,” Simcoe quipped.

“Me? Oh John, I admit, I myself look forward to watching as you discover against your arrogance what the involuntary physiological response of inviting injury entails -”

“Gentlemen, may I suggest again for the record that this is incredibly foolish and I would strictly advise against it,” Wakefield said, exasperated. It was no used, Simcoe thought. Hewlett was livid, which meant he already had him as onside as he would ever truly be.

“Dully noted,” they replied in unison with varied degrees of agitation.

“Very well,” he spoke. He stopped. The doctor looked as though he was battling within himself to determine if his general dislike for his teammates otherwise outweighed his Hippocratic Oath.

“Do you want to start on Sunday?” Simcoe asked as the screen froze into a fixed frown.

“You don’t make those decisions,” Hewlett said as if he imagined that the manager or anyone else on their team did, or that Simcoe lacked other means of achieving his ends if rank would not alone suffice.

“Quite right,” the captain chirped. “How … perceptive. Perhaps I ought to rephrase. John,” he addressed Wakefield in pleasant tones, learning in closer to the camera. “I would certainly like to be able to play out the rest of the season; presuming you have similar intentions towards you physical capacities, I would suggest that you advise – in so far as you can – what might be done to cauterize this cut from the comfort of my kitchen as no other course of action is ethically or economically within my interest.” 

Wakefield capitulated. A puncture wound, he said, should prove relatively easy to close. They would want to use a blade with a heavy handle, heated slowly with charcoal. Here he paused, emphasising to the point of redundancy that they did not want to attempt to heat a utensil in a microwave or electric oven. Hewlett added (assumingly because he liked feeling as though his own understanding of scientific principles was as relevant to the task at hand as whatever he imagined a foot-doctor’s to be) that while unlikely to cause a fire, it would reduce the efficiency of the device. Simcoe nodded. He did not care either way. Living within walking distance from various food trucks and hot dog vendors, he never used his kitchen. Still, he told them, he had something suitable from the summer under his sink and enough unburnt charcoal to heat the tip of a blade.

“Hold it to the skin long enough to close the wound but not so long as to burn into the healthy tissue, tapping in short bursts to make sure it is not over done. Once the bleeding has stopped - _time to stop_ , understood?” Wakefield insisted. Hewlett nodded. “And Edmund, I think it almost without question given the content of this conversation that I’ll be making a house call out in Setauket tonight. Set up the table for a round of Warhammer, will you?”

“I … it is,” Hewlett stammered. “It is sort of short notice; I wouldn’t want to put out poor -”

“I have a waiting room full of sick and screaming toddlers and the parents they learned such behaviours from, not to mention two partners and five nurses whose ire I’ve earned for your sake. It does not fall under my job description, I’ll remind you, to offer consultation to a pair of thirty-somethings -”

“I’m twenty-seven,” Simcoe defended, questioning if time had in fact taken as hard of a toll on him as it had on Hewlett. No, he glanced over. Frowning, his friend though only seven years his senior, looked well over forty. Looking back at Wakefield, he wondered how so many children managed to injure their wee feet. He thought to ask, but Hewlett was in the process of hyperventilating, tasking Simcoe to come up with a polite way of explaining to him once he had finished his tantrum that he would simply not allow him to stall further by calling his shrink. Maybe after they cauterized the wound. No. Maybe after football should the French happened to win at Wembley. That he could permit - perhaps even personally understand.

For now though, Hewlett was being absurd.

“You can’t – you shouldn’t say that you are planning to purchase,” he lowered his voice to a paranoid whisper, “ _marijuana_ over Skype. What if we are being hacked?”

“Hewlett,” Wakefield said dryly, “it is 2015, you can legally buy weed over the internet. But I like Uncle Lewis and I support local business where I can. Warhammer. Tonight. You extended the invitation with the words _‘I mean to stab Captain Simcoe’_ on my office line. Before I’ve had my first office coffee at that. To wit, speaking of things you might not wish to say openly online …”

“Ah, I, that wasn’t … I,” he stuttered. “This is rather unfair of both of you and I will have it noted-”

“What is Warhammer?” Simcoe interrupted.

“Strategy game,” Hewlett scowled. “Rather, strategic talk for _‘we are going to roll dice for half an hour to establish pretence in order to oblige Mrs Woodhull to set two extra spaces at her table.’_ ”

“So it is Dungeons and Dragons?” Simcoe tried to clarify.

“Sure.”

“Is this a frequent occurrence?” he asked, still confused that the somewhat asocial leisurely activities of two of his teammates had found a means to overlap. Confused that he was never invited to take part in laying siege to Whitehall’s kitchen. Perhaps the two feared being demolished and demoralized in the construct of the campaign they openly acknowledged they had no intent to commit themselves to. Perhaps his gameplay would kill Wakefield’s high. He wondered how long a round lasted, figuring he would have them both bested within three, wondering if that would take an entire half hour.

It seemed unlikely, he thought, momentarily satisfied with the series of conclusions he had come to.

“After the morning you have given me, after my free advice, I think the criticism deserved,” Wakefield paused. “You two going to watch the friendly?”

“Yea.”

“Tell me how it goes later on, around six?”

“Make it five-thirty, let’s give her some notice – no, no, it is Tuesday,” Hewlett thought aloud. “Abraham has his band thing at DeJong’s on Tuesdays. I remember this somehow but Mrs Woodhull usually forgets. There will be enough food … whenever you show.”

With this, they said their goodbyes. Simcoe closed his notebook, turned to his makeshift surgeon and smiled.

“Well,” Hewlett swallowed, placing his hands rigidly on his kneecaps, looking very much like a man who lacked the courage of his convictions.

“I wouldn’t trust anyone to do this but you, you know that, don’t you?” Simcoe tried to assure him.

“I … I don’t quite know what to say to that end, but, thank you, I suppose. Even though I imagine I’m to take it as an insult – I’m ‘too weak to hurt you’ or however you would best phrase it.”

Hewlett hurt him constantly. But he did not need to know this. Nor did he need to know that there was some measure of strength in the fact that he projected no true desire to do so. Saying as much would be an insult to the integrity of the animosity that had always existed between them; as was, Simcoe realised after too-late had past, the acknowledgement that he truly did trust the little shite. The thought agitated him. It was easier to trust in mutual hatred than one-sided admiration.

“Nervous?” he mocked, hoping to reset their equilibrium in so far as he could.

“It is only that … well, I, I wish I had some way of giving Mrs. Woodhull a bit of notice. Rather inconvenient.”

Simcoe felt the slap as he was certain it was intended.

“Do you not have her number?” he challenged.

“Ah, no. No. When Wakefield says he is coming over to play some game or another he does so because my housemate is a splendid cook who always invites him to dine with the family. He, being her child’s paediatrician and everything. He just eats so much when he ah … comes hungry.”

“Woodhull has a kid?”

“Yea.”

“What wrong with its feet?”

Simcoe wondered if there was a large-scale epidemic and if it might account for the fact that Americans were such piss-poor footballers as a nation. Certainly, it explained the term ‘soccer’ they used in place of proper English, afraid to call the world’s attention to their apparent affliction.

“Are you that daft?” Hewlett scoffed. “Mind your root vowels when calling my Greek to question. A paediatrician treats children, a podiatrist feet. Which is hardly something I should find myself tasked with explaining to someone who fast tracked Cambridge – though I am uncertain why this surprises me, giving your other beliefs on modern medicine.” Hewlett spoke each word quicker and harder than the one that proceeded it, as was often his pattern. Vowels! He said. Face half buried in his palms, Hewlett was a burden to make sense of. This was often true of his speech (and that in the rare instances he managed to hold himself to a specific topic.) Now, or so Simcoe gathered, he had circled in the span of a single minute from dead languages to colleges to what consisted medical care back to complaining about the family that granted him quarter, fearing that he might aggravate them in some way that extended beyond his general presence.

It seemed as though he considered every act of engagement a chore. But then, having met Abraham, Simcoe reasoned, perhaps it would prove such for himself as well.  But the younger Mr. Woodhull would be out for the evening as Hewlett had stated. Were they all quite so cagy? He hoped never to learn.

Still, Simcoe felt himself questioning how often Hewlett had other people round and why he was never invited to join. It was rather rude. But then so were Hewlett and Wakefield, the later of whom had a wife of his own capable - in theory - of cooking.

“Even weed can’t get Wakefield to force down Claudia’s pork chops?”

“Evidently not. No matter. Under the influence I suppose I would rather have him at Whitehall than behind the wheel, still I imagine it must be a terrible bother -”

“Does this happen often?” Simcoe demanded, now convinced he was being intentionally excluded.

“Define ‘ _often_ ’. Bunch of the lads come round to play board games once a month … usually on Thursdays when Mrs Woodhull has her book club meeting at my request … and on those nights Abraham and Aberdeen will occasionally join in if only to steal our crisps – so I suppose it evens out in terms of calorie consumption.  Sometimes we will meet up elsewhere. I would prefer if we did but Whitehall is fairly central. But this, with Wakefield, only ever follows an atypically stressful workweek – which is rather unfortunate. He is the only other person I know who plays Warhammer this side of the Atlantic.”

“What?”

“Ah, for example,” he said raising an index finger, “do you happen to remember last year when the story dominating every local and national news network was that some chap who tested positive for Ebola had eaten at a pizzeria, here, in the city? Apparently it was a nightmare for the practice – parents of healthy children tend to become angry when they are denied a cause to sue.”

He remembered but it did not address his concerns.

“Hewlett, why am I never invited over for game night?” Simcoe asked directly.

“You’d hate it,” his present nemesis said flatly.

“That’s not fair. Who does this little group of yours consist of?”

“All of my friends and most of yours. Plus Woodhull and his au pair if my mum’s sent a few bags of Walker’s.”

“Why have I never heard of this?”  

“You … ah. Do you remember the time when we were at Akinbode’s old place and you failed to comprehend the objective of Democracy regardless of the effort we _all_ put into explaining -”

“Because I won in a single round?” Simcoe taunted. “Well … you I can understand – Easton too if I have a think on it, but do you truly mean to imply that everyone else we play footy with at the weekend is still embittered over that little engagement? Sore losers, the lot of you.”

Two years, he realised in horror. Two years he had been slighted from social outings, and Hewlett spoke of it almost casually as though he expected him not to take offence.

“Simcoe, the object of the game isn’t to immediately enact the nuclear option. It is about international politics. It is about winning hearts and minds rather than employing tactics which -”

“Do any of you follow the news?” he gaped, disbelieving. “That is how the game is played. You threaten military action at the slightest twitch. Then you pray for someone to call your claim.” 

“And then you are met with sanctions -”

“Strike anyway,” Simcoe insisted. “War is a net positive for the economy. How do you think the Americans do it? Look outside, this was not all built on passive behaviour.”

“And this is _precisely_ why no one invites you round to play strategy games.”

“Oh, good to know. Though I rather wish you would all bring your evident inability to suffer defeat to the pitch on Sundays where it might actually serve.”

“My inability?” Hewlett shook his head in frustration. “Loath though I am to point this out, you are the one in the throes of jealousy over not being invited to participate in something you do not enjoy, precisely because haven’t the patience or self-control to prove successful in it. Come, if you want. I’ll text you next time we plan to meet up. I don’t expect it should become an ongoing point of contention.”

Perhaps he was jealous. Perhaps he simply needed to remind everyone of his prowess. Simcoe felt the sting of the butter-knife again in his breast, near his heart. Too near. Did they all think him weak for the manner in which he had obtained it? Had he proven himself such?

“You’ll regret it,” he boasted, his pitch raising to a painful sting. “By round three I’ll have you all begging, pleading for the mercy and deliverance that you’ve long ceased in believing in. Or you can meet me in open combat. Wouldn’t that be satisfying.”

“I don’t have to sink to your level to beat you, John. I just have to wait.”

“For someone to ride to the rescue?”

“For you to destroy yourself, which shouldn’t take nearly many turns as hear you tell it. Despite your pretence of control, you can only contain your inner beast for so long. And when it lashes out, I will be ready with all the excuse I need to put you down like the mad dog that you are.”

“That same beast you decry is what will always give me the edge. For I’m willing to do what you are not.”

Hewlett broke into a grin. Simcoe failed to find the same amusement.

“Are you willing to put money behind that claim?” Hewlett challenged.

“That I can beat you all at some nerd game, sure. Let’s. And now let’s get on with it,” he said confidently, extended his hand as he rose. “The match starts in a half hour-”

“Twenty minutes,” Hewlett corrected, pedantic as ever. He took Simcoe’s hand, pulling himself up from the couch rather than shaking it as a gentleman ought.

He should not have invited him over. He should have spent the morning in Lola’s company, pretending she was Anna and that his cut on his chest came from some place of affection rather than the antipathy currently on offer. He wished Hewlett would drop the act of concern he seemed to find so convincing that they might return to their usual match-day disagreements over who was class and who had simply landed himself a contract at a big club.

Insulting Henderson was easier, anyway, than contending with the reality that he himself had been excluded.

By everyone he knew.

“Right you are,” he said, looking at his wrist for a watch he was not wearing. “We really haven’t the time to spend arguing over the inevitable. Do … what you came to, if you dare.”

“Ah, John. When I defeat you in a week or two, which, make no mistake of it, I will, I fully plan on reminding you that not only were you fool enough to challenge me to a contest of wit - the rules of which I am but certain you will make no effort to understand - but that you actually meant to have me cauterize a cut rather than go to hospital. Forget this nonsense. We can stay to watch the game if you insist but afterward we are getting your wound treater where the procedure would prove both safe and sanitary. Truthfully, it never ceases to confound me how anyone -”

He was a coward. In conflicting ways they both were.

“I don’t like hospitals,” Simcoe interrupted, “and I don’t understand what I have ever done to make you care, and maybe you don’t, but insofar as you plan on carrying on with your whole act of what I imagine you’d describe as ‘human decency’ or some such bullocks I’d far prefer your assistance to anyone else’s. Including someone licenced to charge several thousand to illicit what I essentially imagine will be the same result.”

“Simcoe I … confess words fail me,” Hewlett blushed.

_He blushed._ Red flooded his wide cheekbones in conjunction with the sick that rose in Simcoe’s stomach. Clearly, he had misspoken.

“Then perhaps I wasn’t clear in my meaning, I want to look upon your face as it twists between the disgust you’ll doubtlessly take in preforming said task and the fear of retribution that will consume you afterwards. Or,” he taunted, “Perhaps you’ll find you enjoy inflicting and inciting malice as much as I have always suspected you might.”

“Oh, wow, do you have me there,” Hewlett rolled his eyes. “If I truly wished to torture you, John, I wouldn’t touch you at all. It is that which you can’t stand.”

“What do you mean by that?” he snapped.

“That you want for constant attention the way a naughty child might. What else would I possibly mean?”

Simcoe tried to speak but found himself silenced by sudden misgivings. Hewlett smiled as though he knew something he supposed himself uniquely privileged to.

“If you insist upon doing this, we play by the book. I don’t want to create another situation that could see you benched on Sunday.”

“You are weak, Hewlett. How deep do you imagine your blade went?” Simcoe stared, “I didn’t play last weekend as I had a two-match ban, not because I was in some terrible pain I found myself unable to play through.”

“Ah - I should think it pierced your very heart the way you are carrying on.”

For a fleeting moment, Simcoe found himself falling into a pair of dark eyes marked by darker intentions. He swallowed, tasting stomach acid or adrenaline touch at the back of his tongue. He could not explain to himself if it was sickness he felt towards what he took as flirtation or something far more sinister. Maybe he was imagining it. Maybe it was inevitable.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> … They should just kiss and get it over with. And then go kill a politician, commit fraud and fuck (around?) with women way out of their league. Euh … might want to close that wound first. (Symbolic? Never.)
> 
> What do you think? Let me know in the comments. And as always, thanks for reading! XOXO – Tav
> 
> Up Next: Why Simcoe didn’t join the Armed Forces, and maybe the first Hewlett POV I’ll have written in 2k17. Maaaaybe.


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Hewlett struggles with Simcoe’s chest hair, stories of cross-cultural circumcisions, supressed feelings and the cauterization of the wound he inflicted in self-defence. 
> 
> ... and then they kiss.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This may well be one of the darkest chapters I have ever posted, and I am accustom to writing about the how the immediate aftermath of a murdered senator effects global economics and the lives of illegal immigrants living in a small suburb.
> 
> But hey! It is also (surprisingly!) one of the most romantic things I have ever put to paper and _dun dun dun_ the first Eddie Hew POV I have handled in 2k17.
> 
> Enjoy!

“Do you … do you know what I find most attractive about the multiverse theory?” Edmund Hewlett asked rhetorically, his face so twisted with repulsion that it transformed itself into a source of physical anguish. “The idea that in some alternative universe I might have gone my whole life without ever learning that about you – that you might have gone your whole life without ever feeling oddly compelled to relate that … episode from your past to me or anyone else for that matter. Christ, man! Honestly, what is wrong with the people born to and occupying these colonies?”

“Oyster,” Simcoe replied, eerily calm as was the standard with which he met mild hysteria. I am merely trying to explain that despite all of the effort you seem to be putting into psyching me out, it won’t work. I’ve had worse. I’ve brought worse upon myself and I am ready whenever you are. What have the Americas to do with things, pray tell?”

What John Graves Simcoe had, in fact being conveying with the same disconcerting nonchalance was a story of circumcision – the second, Hewlett noted, he had been forced to endure within the course of a single week. At seven years old, as John told it, he has been living with his father in Pakistan, attending a day school outside of the barracks and enduring the torment of his classmates for what they suddenly, simultaneously saw as a physical aberration.

 _‘Your hair?’_ Hewlett had replied with acid, annoyed by the amount of it he discovered on his sometimes-friend’s chest as he tried to shave the area around the wound with a pink plastic razor some faceless woman had left in Simcoe’s flat – thinking it would do less to aggravate the cut than the loud electric contraption he used on his face.

 _‘My hair?’_ the ginger replied as though he had never considered or confronted the gaucherie of its cut and colour, even in the back hole of Calcutta or wherever it was that defined his youth.

 _‘You know,’_ Hewlett reproached, _‘Aristotle proclaimed redheads to be emotionally un-housebroken.’_

 _‘Good on him,’_ Simcoe shrugged. _‘I lived on a military base; my hair was kept accordingly short. I should doubt the other children could much discern its colour or much cared to. No, they laughed about my foreskin, at that age, in that region, a mark or immaturity.’_ Hewlett blinked; surprised that inertia did not explain or excuse the travesty that was Simcoe’s tresses. He had long assumed that any adult willing to wear a mullet did so because one or both of their parents had done so in the poor taste of more forgiving times  – being either behind on fashion or behind the iron curtain back in the eighties before it ceased to have a physical manifestation.

 _‘In the span of a month,’_ Simcoe continued before allowing Hewlett a chance to inquire, _‘I had gone from loving physical education to dreading it until I took measures upon myself to … better integrate, shall we say.’_ He hoped he would not. He hoped the conversation would end there, though he knew it to be in vain. Any soliloquy involving some experience on the subcontinent, experience instructed, was bound to be painfully drawn out. Still, Hewlett found some measure of hope in what he was being made to suffer. Simcoe was perturbed, perhaps to the point at which he could be convinced to seek proper treatment – which had been his goal all along.

_‘Did you never think to ask?’_

_‘Ah -’_

_‘Have you never, in the shower after practice, I mean - only there – considered me in that sense?’_ Simcoe asked again, almost timidly, his natural falsetto raised to a piercing tone.

_‘Perhaps I am unobservant, perhaps this owes itself to – as I am sure you are readying yourself to assert – that I am not half the man of science as I fancy myself being, but no John, I have never once in my life glanced your manhood and thought it might have a story worth telling. Truly, having just acknowledged that question with a response I find I am in turn forced to inquired, this event to which you allude – is it the first and last time you have ever subjected yourself to the norms of any society? For generally I’d avoid making such statements altogether.’_

_‘Don’t think I’ve never noticed. That. This,_ ’ he glanced down, compelling Hewlett’s own eyes to follow to the fingertips suspended in inactivity on Simcoe’s broad chest. Hewlett removed them instantly and repositioned them over his own now-coloured cheeks. Simcoe had sensed something amiss in him, he realised, and had filled the considerable holes in his understanding with assumption as anyone might. It was unpleasant. It was embarrassing. It was the only instance, Hewlett thought in the few precious seconds of silence that spanned between half-spoken accusation and a story Simcoe for some incomprehensible reason felt obliged to continue, that he had ever felt alone in his cherished rival’s presence.

He shut his eyes and prayed it all to stop.

But prayer, it seemed, could not escape the depths of hell.

The devil explained that he had asked his father to take him to infirmary in order to rid him of his scorned foreskin. John Simcoe Sr. – one of the only sane individuals, it seemed, to ever enter into any of Simcoe’s narratives – refused, scolding his half-namesake to man up. Hewlett pointed out that were he in the situation, he would have taken these words to simply mean _‘deal with it’_ – which, Simcoe stated was precisely what he did. But he was not weak. He did not swallow slights. _‘Emotionally un-housebroken’_ Hewlett muttered once more.

John’s version of sorting what his classmates informed him was a problem involved following one of them to a Maktab after regular classes had ended and imploring the local Imam to do to him what had been done to the boys he went to school with. This Imam – the other seeming sane individual to take part in this particular story – kindly refused him on religious grounds, even when offered hundreds of thousands of rupees to make the cut. _‘At that point, I would have given up,’_ Hewlett sighed.

 _‘I’ll reiterate, old friend, the difference between you and I is that I am willing to do that which you are not,’_ Simcoe smiled. _‘I have an edge.’_

 _‘You have a problem.’_ Hewlett commented, concealing his eyes once more behind his palm.

Upon seeing the cash on offer (the equivalent, Simcoe informed him, of around five pounds) the boy from the day school brought him to his older brother, who then brought them both into his bedroom and laughing, offered John a shot-sized bottle of Jägermeister he bragged about stealing from his part-time job at the UN commissary.  The teen instructed him to down it first to help him handle the pain. His friend assured him this was normal, that he himself had taken a sip before his own khatna but Simcoe refused, sceptical that this might itself be a test of his revolve. The brother told him to suit himself, opened the small flash and swallowed it in a single motion before breaking it against the trunk from which it had been produced. He then quickly performed five pounds worth of cosmetic surgery with a small cut from the jagged edge of a broken bottle.

 _‘I felt cheated,’_ Simcoe lamented. _‘After seeing how easily it was done I thought I could well have done that to myself, and saved some more of my allowance money for the recovery.’_ He had gone to the commissary afterwards –the same, presumably, from which the surgical blade had been stolen- bought himself some American chocolate and a box of the sort of bands women use to separate their monthly blood from their clothing. He had the sense, he said, to explain to the cashier that these items were for his mother – not that he had been asked. He ate the sweets straight away that he would spoil his appetite, ensuring that his father’s anger would alien itself in that direction, ensuring that he would assume his son cried at night as the result of being in trouble for disobeying a normal household rule rather than from the pain he found himself in.  _‘I bled for three days,’_ Simcoe seemed to brag. _‘Afterwards it was as if it had never been there, my friends all congratulated me on my valour and I could enjoy sport once more. My father never found out what I had done.’_

 _‘Were that I could share his fate,’_ Hewlett said – meaning, in the moment, all of it. He would have rather have died far too young in a roadside bombing than have been subjected to the story he had just been told. The second, he noted, he had been forced to suffer within a single week.

Simcoe looked dejected, then grew defensive, asking if this was common in America as well, recalling his earlier anger at being excluded from the sorts of games Hewlett knew him not to enjoy.

“I wouldn’t call it common … anywhere,” the Scot squinted. “I know you can with stand physical extremes, I knew that without – ah!” he shook his head. Simcoe, expressionless, nodded in rhythm with his speech. This, as Hewlett saw it, may well be his last shot at talking his friend back from the edge. “What I still fail to comprehend is why now you would rather subject yourself to something torturous when you have ready means available,” he chastised. “It might well be an enormous difference in cost but we – John, do you know why you trust me, as you claim to – it if it even true - it is because I am not reckless the way you are. Even you can see some sense -”

“Edmund. Come off your high horse for once in your miserable life,” Simcoe replied bluntly, leaning forward in his chair. “You stabbed me and then ran off into the night, exposing yourself to the elements at length and yet you have the audacity to accuse me of failing to properly sort for my health?”

“You bet my clothing in a beer pong tournament and lost, the cops were on their way, I was rather wasted but still had it together enough to realise that were I to be found, not only would I be faced with an assault charge but with the far more damning public exposition and intoxication,” Hewlett defended. “When in Rome, as they say. What’s more,” he continued, over-enunciating each individual word yet failing to find semblance within the syllables that built them, “I’ll have it noted that I _did_ go to hospital the morning after, not wanting to risk frost bite. My toes, you see -”

“Lot of good that did you,” Simcoe droned. “You have been here for over an hour and still have yet to remove your coat.”

“I’m cold. I’m always bloody cold now thanks to you.”

“In my defence I’d assumed the fuzz would have shot you on sight. And you don’t have frostbite. Your hypochondria is again fighting your genetic sense of hubris into a stalemate. That, on your toes?” he seemed to mock, “That is athlete’s foot. You’ve had it for months. You won’t do anything about it as you find it too embarrassing to walk into an apothecary and ask for a common cream. Same, I’ll give you, as I myself would have walking into the ER and explaining that you – of all people on this earth – managed to strike such a blow.”

“To be fair, your method of sorting this injury before I suggested otherwise was to drown it in rather expensive alcohol and wank.”

“As one ought. You were the one who suggested cauterisation in the first place -”

“Because I never so much as imagined that you would be willing -”

“It is like you don’t even know me. I’m hurt, Edmund. Truly hurt.”

Maybe, Hewlett considered, he was.

He examined the wound blistering with an infection made more visible by the removal of hair. Simcoe’s pale blue eyes that seem less the solid blocks of ice than he had long acclimated himself towards.  

Hewlett felt he was drowning along with his hopes of victory. Simcoe was adamant in the terms he had lain out for surrender. Ever the diplomat, Hewlett began to negotiate a ceasefire, realising in disgust and dismay as he spoke that seeing Simcoe as depressed as he had been all morning was its own kind of personal torment, one he had not considered himself susceptible to.

He loved him and he didn’t. Indecision had always been his mortal sin and he found himself vis à vis from a devil who almost unwittingly offered him a choice - nay, demanded that he make one.

The problem was, as it had always been, that he would always choose Simcoe.

The problem was, as it had always been, that he did not love him. Not, at least, as much as he loved the animosity that existed between them. The hatred they occasionally referred to as friendship if only because language was a social construct and what they were, in truth, seemed to defy each standard one could think to hold it against.

Maybe that was what love was. Maybe that was the problem. Simcoe looked at him expectantly to continue. Hewlett looked away, fearing further entrapment in eyes so rarely shut.

“I was in the study with Richard and Abraham this past weekend,” he offered, “discussing the bard over a bottle of whiskey, when Woodhull-the-Elder noticed his grandson playing quietly in the corner.”

His host family was always useful in terms of directing Simcoe’s ire back to the insignificant. Though he hardly understood what it was in particular that John disliked in them, they served enough of his purpose that Hewlett did not dare question it. This was how barricades were constructed. This is how passions were tamed.

“I still can’t intellectually grasp that Abe Woodhull has a wife and child,” Simcoe said, once again proving the effectiveness of this particular tactic. “Where is the justice?”

“The universe is indifferent though it seems cold and unforgiving, I’ll afford you that much. At any rate – this you might appreciate given the substance of the story you forced upon my ears - Richard commented on how he had not noticed the child, to which Abraham responded that this was because he was not circumcised at hospital after his birth – the way he himself had been. He went into a sort of eulogy for the foreskin he was never given a chance to know, recounting failed attempts to regrow it as a teen.”

Simcoe’s eyes widened around pupils frozen in some space occupied by nothing but his stare. It gave him a mad look which only intensified when the lip he bit to conceal his laughter caused the whole of his face to redden, deprived from breath. This cause Hewlett to snort which made Simcoe surrender to the mess that was any and every narrative that happened to feature one Abe Woodhull. As a teen, Simcoe informed him, when he had apparently been attempting to achieve a different aesthetic, he had dated Anna – she of the cleavage that factored into DeJong’s passing the heath inspection – and where was the justice? Ah! Hewlett thought. So that explained as much as anything ever would why John was so keen to lead the small yet significant anti-Abe faction that existed in Setauket, consisting primarily of the two of them, plus Easton who loathed everyone, and Richard, who nearly thirty years ago had made the fatal error of physically separating his son from something rather odd to have any sort of emotional attachment towards. But as to Simcoe’s question of justice, Hewlett was at a loss. He had come to expect he would never find it in this world and set his eyes on the heavens only to discover ways of describing that vastness of disorder that failed to fit exactly into the formulae prescribed by millennia of predecessors.

“Returning for a moment to your beloved multiverse theory,” Simcoe mused, “do you suppose there is a version of our existence in which the favour the world seems to so unfairly bestow on Abe Woodhull’s love life is socially or scientifically comprehensible?”

“Imagining that there could be is among my principle objections to this loose hypothesis.”

“You should write your thesis on that.”

“Believe me; he continues to provide ammunition for your argument. When the Woodhull’s finished what turned into a fight about a number of things not directly related to Abraham’s, um, gender as though I were not present, I commented that I had never been forced to consider it before but there might well be something to his prepuce-rhetoric. Young Sprout and I are able to conduct ourselves with decorum, you see, whereas he finds it suitable to circum…vent what otherwise might have proven polite conversation.”

For a fleeting moment, Simcoe seemed to take the slight as intended.

“I hope you’re not suggesting -” he started, laughter fading.

“Oh no, John,” Hewlett interrupted, “I would never mistake ours for the sort of exchanges denotive of culture.”

“Thank God for that at least,” the injured ginger sneered.

“Quite,” he smiled. Stopped. Surrendered as planned. “If you are serious about the cauterization-”

“You have no idea the lengths I’d go to. To illustrate -”

“Please don’t,” Hewlett begged. Had then not been through this? Why must everything be a display of force with this man?

“Yesterday I purchased a breakfast sandwich on my way to work. Bacon, egg, sausage, beans you know – healthy and well balanced.”

“Sure,” Hewlett said with caution.

“I decided to take it a step further and ordered in on whole-wheat.”

At this Hewlett rose in alarm. At seven, under social pressures he found between the base he had been born to and the territory it occupied, subjecting himself to something Hewlett gather he did not entirely understand (though Simcoe admitted reluctantly, that it had hurt far less than Woodhull had made it out to) was one matter. It was excusable, even. Simcoe had been a child.

Willingly substituting wheat bread for real bread twenty years and countless errors of judgement later, however, was a crime unto its own. “Christ! You do have some serious masochistic tendencies, you do,” Hewlett exclaimed in horror and dismay. Clearly, he had underestimated Simcoe as Simcoe so often underestimated him. He began to pace, overcome with the energy of his own nerves.

“No, never again. It was misery.”

“I well should suspect!”

 “Your blade can’t be worse. I’ve known worse. Recently even.” If it was a challenge, Hewlett was ready to accept. For everything else he might be, Simcoe was a demon and he was in a position to slay him. Should his worst fears play out, there would be one less person in the world willing to disrupt centuries of proud tradition in deference to a health craze born from media buzzwords. Should he fall, as he also half-suspected, well, at least he would not be subjected to further mockery of a proper English breakfast or stories thereof.

“Right. I’ll be right back,” Hewlett said, raising his hands in caution. “Stay seated. I refuse to, ah - in essence, stab you on your balcony overlooking a crowed street blocks away from a police station.”

“Pity,” Simcoe said. Ignoring the instruction he had been given to remain seated, he rose and returned to the space in his open flat designated as a living room by a sofa and flat screen. He took a woollen throw from where it was folded on the back of the couch. Simcoe then rushed back – or he didn’t – his legs were too long to give a proper sense of speed and motive when observed over short distances - regardless suddenly Hewlett felt himself wrapped in a warm blanket and a reluctant embrace. “That you won’t be cold anymore.” Simcoe patted his back and kissed the top of his head the way he did when celebrating a goal or demonstrating their stark difference in height to strangers Hewlett otherwise had hoped to impress – in both cases, a way of saying ‘ _I’ve won_.’

And maybe, Hewlett conceded, he had. In every sense. Their eyes met. Simcoe informed him that this was meant to be comforting.

“I – I gathered as much.”

“Is it helping?” he asked.

“Are you stalling?” Hewlett challenged.

“Of course not,” Simcoe said. After giving him a hard push, he followed him outside where a steak knife was being heated in a cheap charcoal grill bought for a summer festival they had never gotten to attend. Hewlett wore winter thermals under his jeans, jersey, pullover, blazer, long coat and now a blanket that had been turned into thick shawl by its placement. Simcoe, in contrast,wore the bottom half of an Adidas tracksuit which Hewlett supposed would have been better than declaring some familial alliance by donning the whole thing were it not for the weather.

“You’ll catch a cold, John,” Hewlett cautioned, knowing it to be of no use. He hoped the shag carpet on his sometimes-friend’s chest would prove as difficult for the chill to penetrate as it had proven for the single-blade holiday razor left by some bird in place of her number. With the thought of the pink plastic and the sort of girl who kept such items in her handbag –did they all? - Hewlett felt an ugly envy he struggled to identify.

“Not if you do it proper. The wind-chill, I suspect, should numb the pain, the way peas do,” Simcoe answered confidently. This reminded Hewlett that his mate was a moron and that he himself was an even more extreme example of asininity for so much as considering – no. No. He knew his limits. He knew the lay of the lines that were not to be crossed.

John gave the grill a side-glance and gave Hewlett, the morning, and the pain he anticipated a cheeky grin.

Hewlett sighed.

He lifted the blade to examine it. It has grown red in the fires and Simcoe, beside it, grew considerably pale. Hewlett told him to go inside, get the schnapps and not to consider this particular exercise in idiocy an act of valour. He would not be much impressed with his high-pitched battle cry regardless of how brave or brutal Simcoe might be tempted to recall his piercing screams when he undoubtedly would later force this story on an unwilling audience too inebriated to offer a proper protest.

“And get the chair from the kitchen table,” he shouted, placing his Dyrnwyn back into its charcoal hilt, feeling the burn of having drawn it for a cause of questionable worth.

When Simcoe returned with a chair from a dining table that had never – to Hewlett’s immediate knowledge – served that distinction, he placed it in the inside of the doorway connecting the balcony to the flat and ordered Simcoe to sit. This raised an eyebrow but the captain complied after a small chastising comment with regard to his general manner that Hewlett was keen to ignore. He placed the woollen blanket he had been wearing as an extra cloak over Simcoe’s bare shoulders – telling him once more that he did not want him to catch cold, fearing the stress that might ensue from later convincing him to take cough syrup or some measure of caution in recovery.

“Take a sip,” he hissed, shoving the bottle of Aquavit he had been handed into Simcoe’s face. Eyes widening, he complied.

“Thank you, it was delicious.”

“As mercy often is,” Hewlett replied, pouring a small amount onto the wound itself before taking a heavy dosage of Simcoe’s self-prescribed medicine for himself. “I mean for this to act as a local anaesthetic,” he explained as he unsheathed the blade once more.

“Tosh,” Simcoe said, “As you are so keen to remind me, I’m a ginger, genetically immune to anaesthesia, I can handle any measure of pain. I’ve learned to deal.”

“Is that really true? Concerning redheads, I mean?” Hewlett questioned.

“Let’s try and find out,” Simcoe smirked.

It was either the statement or the smile that accompanied it, Hewlett could not tell and it was of little significance, but something in Simcoe’s demeanour angered him more than it ought. Placing his knee on the chair between Simcoe’s knees for balance, he leaned forward until their lips touched. John’s parted in submission and Hewlett pulled his away. He swiftly tapped twice at the wound as he had been instructed to do. The cut closed before Simcoe even seemed to realise what had transpired. Wiping his long mouth, Hewlett put the blade back into the fires from which it came.

He turned his back and took a deep breath. Simcoe, to his surprising credit, added very little soundtrack to the stream of tears involuntarily flowing from his icy eyes, melted either by scorching metal or manifested sin.

Simcoe, laughing almost bitterly, challenged him to do that again.

Hewlett gathered the hair that had fallen into his face in a restraint. “Which part?” he puzzled. Simcoe repeated the question rather than answer it.

“It distracted you, didn’t it?” Hewlett asked, looking at his watch. They still had five minutes before kick off – time which he intended to forget everything that had just taken place lest he be forced to make a decision on the topic of denial which seemed suddenly so much less clear than it had. He offered John a fag when he pulled one for himself and was met with a request for aspirin, to which he replied that it did not mix with alcohol. They were about to watch football and some things – day-drinking during friendlies and white-bread with breakfast among them - were holy. Simcoe, he said, could do well to sort his pain as he had previously.

“You know, there are these rare times in which you seem to have your priorities in order where I’d swear I love you, mate,” Simcoe jested as he lit the Marlboro he had been given. He rose to join Hewlett outside, and looking over the guardrail at Manhattan’s morning skyline, put his arm, and the blanket it carried, around Hewlett’s shoulder.

Hewlett loved him.

And he didn’t.

That was the problem as it had always been.

“Unrelated to my makeshift anaesthetic, I assume,” he said, unsure.

Uncertainty.

That was the problem.

Except that is wasn’t.

The problem was that if forced to choose, he would always pick Simcoe regardless of what was being asked. And now, thanks to his own reckless indiscretion, his beloved enemy knew it.

“Made me as ill as the stuff the make you breathe before surgery.”

“Good,” Hewlett nodded, though he felt rather bad. They smoked in silence until a commentator from the television broke through the sound and smoke and smog of New York in the loud Spanish of the middle-Americas to inform them - along with the rest of the city - that match-day coverage had begun. Hewlett glanced up. Simcoe remained stoic, as though he had not heard the excitement that should not exist before ten in the morning. Hewlett realised he could not give a damn about the game, worried as he was that he might well have ruined sport for his friend, albeit in a very different manner than the taunts Simcoe had been subjected to in the washroom of a Pakistani primary school.

Children hardly knew better. He did. Or, at least, he should. That was the problem. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> References: A **maktab** is an Islamic religious school, in some areas the source of primary education. You learn archaic Arabic and to recite Quranic verse. **Khantna** is Muslim circumcision, not required by the Quran but widely practiced. In Turkey at least you get a little parade and party afterwards for your troubles. An **Imam** leads the call to prayer.
> 
> An **English breakfast** is the answer to and antidote for English beer. There is no substitution.  
>  **Dyrnwyn** is a flaming sword from Welsh Myth, the blade would burn when held by the righteous, the barer when the fight was unjust.
> 
> As always, thanks for reading!


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Simcoe anticipates what any sort of romantic future with Hewlett might bring. Hewlett does his best to ignore it whilst trying to get his would-be Romeo to change the channel.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This was originally intended to just be an opening passage, but it grew to the point that it could suffice its own (somewhat shorter) update.
> 
> I have no real warnings for you this go around, lovely faces, except that parts of this might well read as a *gasp* love story between two blokes who aren’t really feeling it. In other words it is a continuation of the fic you have been reading for three chapters now. Fancy that.

Edmund Hewlett would come to the conclusion that he had stopped loving him long before it inevitably happened.

Eventually, or so Simcoe imagined in light of what had just transpired, he would convince him to move in. He had tried to before of several occasions, the first of which had followed his fist into Abraham Woodhull’s face shortly after the judge’s son had again taken residence in his father’s summer estate (doubtlessly blaming Wall Street for his human failings as disappointments often did.) Simcoe demanded that Hewlett (who had been burdened by proximity with the unfortunate task of picking both himself and the boy whose nose he had bloodied up from the small Setauket police station) justify how he could possibly go on living in what Simcoe had then begun referring to as ‘ _enemy territory’_. Woodhull, as he now recalled, had wondered the same.

Hewlett had been immune to the emotion of the moment and offered a long-winded explanation with regard to expense. Where Abe lost all interest at the very mention of mathematics, Simcoe’s piqued. Edmund Hewlett, he decided in that instant (as he had nearly all of its predecessors) was a complete fool.

The disagreement that over time had proven philosophical had a way of reinserting itself into their mutual understanding every time Simcoe had since brought up the idea of Hewlett moving to the city (where he worked and went to school), from the suburbs (where he did little more than sleep.) Sometimes Simcoe broached the topic out of spite or indigence, sometimes out of the same dread of solitude that defined their loose friendship. He never knew if he was speaking in earnest, but there was something pleasant in having his argument taken as such, for Hewlett evidently spent a considerable amount of mental energy devising curious grounds for rejecting something it seemed he too desired.

It was one of Simcoe’s favourite ongoing battles.

He reasoned that he would surrender something of himself in eventually accepting Hewlett’s sword.

Or perhaps not.

Perhaps Hewlett would continue to complain about whatever percentage he would pay of the power bill, whose considerable costs he would continue to assert owed to Simcoe’s failure to consider the physical properties gutting his penthouse had posed on the parabolic particle differential equation involving the distribution of temperature. Simcoe, for his part, would then get to continue to question why physicists in general - and Hewlett in particular - tried to push calculus onto matters that could well be sorted by basic arithmetic, a simple cost-benefit analysis in this case. They would probably find other such arguments within the realities imposed by domestic life, but, Simcoe considered critically, this is was not this sort of fight that would break them. No. They would inevitably split over perceived shifts rather than hurtful things said in the coded language in which, he mused, they had always spoken the shared sentiment of ‘ _I hope you never change_.’

Edmund Hewlett rolled his eyes at this and again asked why they were watching _Deportes Telemundo_ , adding an element of exaggeration that sounded like ignorance when pronouncing foreign words.

“This is exactly what I am referring to,” Simcoe continued, pausing for a moment to rhetorically question a higher power he had never believed in how he had come to cuddle up to a man whose name he cursed.

‘Cuddle’, Hewlett told him, was hyperbolic. They were sitting on opposite ends of a sofa watching Spanish-language coverage of a soccer match. Simcoe wondered to himself if it would be better to leave these fabricated misgivings exclusively to John André, who would be unable to conceal his repulsion behind a professional title while he tried to determine and dictate to his two patients how they felt.

Personally, Simcoe felt empty. He did not need anyone to tell him why. He imagined it had to do with the fact that fact that Hewlett had responded to his kiss with indifference rather than the dramatic disgust he had been anxiously awaiting. He would get a rise out of him, he swore, if only because Hewlett had ruined his morning fun and any future prospects of its continuation. Now, when Simcoe closed his eyes to imagine Anna from the public house in the role of Lady Lola, he saw her flawless features replaced by Hewlett’s strange face. He wondered if he would be eternally damned to recall kissing the man who had stabbed him right before he cauterized the week-old wound every time he streamed BDSM porn. He wondered what this might otherwise do to his sex life, to his pregame strategy. He wondered what he had really been thinking when his lips parted to receive those that pulled away.

Perhaps it had only been the unreleased - and thus misdirected - testosterone.

Perhaps, he considered with a shutter, his subconscious had travelled down this road before. There was something that seemed too honest in his imaginings of the kind of future he might share with Oyster, whom he supposed he may have to get used to calling ‘Edmund’ if only to spare himself from standard terms of endearment, ‘Lovey’ or ‘Dearie’ or some such bullocks.

The two of them seemed inevitable.

It was revolting.

He stared at the pale, slender man with a face that looked like a teenager’s half-assed attempt to draw something less cartoonish at their art teacher’s insistence. Hewlett shrouded himself in a blanket worn over countless articles of designer clothing. He spoke. Simcoe imagined sitting close enough to touch and felt his sick rise again in his stomach.

Hewlett was right. ‘Cuddle’ was an exaggeration. He hoped it would forever remain one; that his rival would continue have the sense to stay out of reach - but only _just_.

Simcoe declined Hewlett’s request that they change to _Fox_ ’s pregame coverage, but turned the volume down as he continued to voice his doubts as though he intended them to sound threatening.

In truth, with his pitch climbing beyond the reach of most mortal men, he sounded scared.

Perhaps he was.

Hewlett, he said, would let his general awkwardness guide him into a domestic role. He would spot-clean before the maid arrived out of misplaced shame, deciding after a full blown nervous episode or two that he could just as well mop and change the bedsheets each week on his own. He knew how to cook and would insist on doing so, claiming that it relaxed him after a long day of showing his undergraduate students how to look through a telescope. With time, Simcoe would learn to appreciate this after what he considered a longer day of screaming on the trade floor - earning the kind of money that had otherwise allowed him to neglect the sort of household tasks that Hewlett would, for a time, take pleasure in. 

For a while, there would be a sort of peace between them, the same sort of peace that existed in places like Gaza. They would continue to attack each other, belittling one another’s appearances, attitudes, tastes and interests. With time, however, Simcoe would unwillingly learn the name of every constellation and every star that served as a pen stroke in the pictures he would not be able to un-see in the night’s sky. Even years later, he fretted, years after things between them had ended, years after he ceased actively thinking of Edmund every day, he would find his subconscious name something Greek in the familiar hiss of a sometimes-friend who had since become a stranger whenever he found himself alone with the night.

Hewlett too, he imagined, would find himself in his own sort of darkness that did not seem restricted by the hours and would encounter something Byronic and remember the man who had taught him how to properly read and appreciate poetry, likely with the indifference he had given their first kiss.

Again, Hewlett failed to comment.

Simcoe, peeved at thus far being unable to disrupt his guest’s sense of self, found that he was already romanticising the more pleasant points of contention in various tenses. Maybe, he thought, the tendency to do so was the reason ‘love’ and ‘romance’ had become synonymous in a colloquial sense. He would ask André about this as well next week, but only after he had angered him enough through making a mockery of his profession by pretending to participate in treatment that André would not be able to come up with a pseudo-intelligent sounding answer before their hour ended. This would serve to unnerve the doctor all the more before Hewlett came in afterward to cry about whatever it was that sensitive individuals perceived as offensive. André would forget Hewlett’s name again if the world was just.

At least he could still reasonably rely on the reactions of the court-order therapist who seemed to view his patients more as subjects in a case study than he did as clients.

Hewlett, however, continued to defy his expectations. Rather than showing any interest in Simcoe or what he said, the Scot began squinting at the television, as if doing so would make him understand the Spanish language or the change to France’s line up. The hole he had placed near Simcoe’s heart surged with pain, as did the one he had placed inside of it which Simcoe was beginning to acknowledge at subconscious and psycho-symptomatic levels. When he spoke again, his voice was piercing.

It felt as though they were having the fight playing in his head.

One day, he foresaw, Hewlett would tell him over breakfast that he never helped around the house – something he would say in a such a tone as to suggest that Simcoe had ever given any indication that he ever would. Regardless of how he chose to address this, or so he reasoned, Hewlett would continue to find faults where they had never, or rather, had always existed. He would begin to think that Simcoe did not love him because of it and, after countless nights of sitting on the sofa as they were now, with Hewlett sour on its far side, Simcoe would agree.

“I would come to despise you for the person I already know you to be,” he said. “As you would me.”

“You already hate me – a feeling I can but assure you is mutual – and this without any sort of ridiculous scenario that involves me voluntarily paying half of a six-thousand dollar monthly electric bill. John … I confess, you have me confused. What is this?”

“It is destiny,” Simcoe swallowed, adding from behind a jaw he could not force to unhinge, “Lovey.”

Hewlett’s face became a quickly shifting physical manifestation of the layers of hell as Dante described them in his Devine Comedy. Simcoe grinned broadly. He had gotten to him. He’d won.

“Right that is ah – quite an assessment,” Hewlett chocked. “Especially given that I merely asked you – _repeatedly_ \- why we are watching this match in a language that neither of us speak when it _Fox Soccer_ has it in English.”

“It is all the political ads,” Simcoe said dryly. “Can’t do it, mate. I have heard _‘I believe in John Adams’_ so many times now that I am no longer entirely certain if he is an candidate or a cult.”

“Healthy mixture of both, I’d imagine,” Hewlett replied by matching his acid with a base assessment.

“Tried it back in English the other day, thinking that voting was at the beginning of November rather than the end -”

“It is. Next year, this is just the primaries,” Hewlett interrupted, unamused either by the coverage, conversation, or the calamity they both saw American politics as being.

“A year?” Simcoe gaped, almost certain he had misheard.

“Indeed.”

“You’d think that the American’s would consider their country a failed experiment if they need this long to choose representation,” he chastised.

“According to Richard, they tend towards such thoughts every August of an election year,” Hewlett sighed, “the spots, I imagine, should continue despite public disinterest.”

“I think it time to call it. I’m putting in for a transfer back to the City. Fancy joining me?”

“In London?” Hewlett clarified. “No.”

“You think you can stick it out then?” Simcoe mocked.

Hewlett with a glare with and what he would have considered a confident grin had he seen it on any other man. “I am moving to Oxford at the end of January, and as you have been so keen to draw my attention to, the Spanish language sport channels don’t run as many political ads as their English counterparts – I dare say I think I’ll survive the meantime.”

“You are returning in disgrace when the semester ends?”

“I’m returning with a doctorate in astrophysics to a job offer at ESCAT, call it what you will,” Hewlett dismissed him, adding, “But best of luck making it back to base camp when your sick days so happen to coincide with match day. Correct me if I am wrong, but Barclay’s HR is central, is it not?”

“You would abandon me here; leave me alone to my suffering? My, my Edmund,” Simcoe sneered, “Perhaps you are the demon I’ve heard you refer to yourself as in your darkest hours.”

Hewlett’s eyes widened before closing. He covered them with his hand. It was though he was trying to disguise stress for shame. Simcoe did not buy his act, his stuttered correction. In the nearly two decades since first making his acquaintance, he had never known him to care about the ways in which his behaviour affected others.

Their almost kiss had been the most recent in a lengthy series of affirmations of this truth. Yet if there was anything within Hewlett worth lusting for, it was the way he met his own disregard with denial. He wanted to be him and he wanted to break him, at least when it came to interpersonal dealings. Hewlett truly was a demon, and yet everyone seemed to adore him so.

And he could not be bothered to care enough to appreciate it.

“Ah – abandon you? No, no. I – that is, best of luck, uh, truly, but you see with regard to your place in Chelsea, that London is quite a distance -”

“It is an hour by coach,” Simcoe argued hearing a battle horn in something he could not consider an apology, “shorter than the time it takes you to get into New York from Setauket with all of the commuter traffic.”

“Given everything that you laid out in your vivid but fully invalid fantasies this may be a bit uncouth of me to ask,” Hewlett started. Stopped. Smiled as though he had already guessed the answer.

“Well then,” Simcoe mocked, “by all means.”

“Do you have gas or electric in your flat back across the pond?” he inquired.

Simcoe though to beat him with a pillow, but finding that he was already bag of cold-if-not frozen peas in his dominant hand elected to throw it instead, along with an insult about hypothermia, hypochondria, and the A Level that Hewlett could not convince him he had in Classical Greek.

Hewlett, to his credit and Simcoe’s surprise, immediately mounted a counter attack. “Sit up,” he said as he crawled over the cushion serving as a barricade between then. “Let’s see it then.”

He then nodded, either pleased with his quick handwork or pleased he had left a scar.

“Do it again,” Simcoe said as Hewlett lightly drew his fingertips down his chest. For a moment, he saw or imagined something in Edmund’s eyes that threatened to convince him the Scot had a soul. Then he spoke. “Christ John, I just want to watch the friendly.”

Hewlett truly was a demon, and yet there were moments he adored him, if only because he knew his rival could not be bothered to care enough to appreciate it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I have no notes for you, do you have notes for me? I love comments and you of course for reading. Thanks as always!
> 
> Up Next: At this point, I am really starting to think Simcoe and Hewlett would be the most annoying people to watch sport with. But more exactly – why oh why does Eddie Hew think Simcoe’s assessment of the life they might share unfair? It is rather poetic, almost … punny, one might say -


	5. Chapter 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Hewlett tries to hold down a conversation with a man he has very confused feelings towards.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter presupposes a base understanding of European culture or at least, sport. And soda.  
> So before we get into it, here are some[ footnotes](https://tavsancuk.tumblr.com/post/164825197280/so-the-notes-to-the-coming-chapter-of-forty-proof) it might be worth your time to skim … heh. As it turns out I can be rather long-winded. Who knew, right?
> 
> General warnings for this update include lust, feelings of inadequacy, fears of commitment … and a really disgusting description of a German comfort food I well imagine you may be put off to.
> 
> As always, thank you for reading and I hope you enjoy!

“There is absolutely no part of your assessment of our purely hypothetical romance that I do not take some measure of issue or offence with,” Edmund Hewlett argued. “Above all, you cannot –cannot possibly believe in your heart of hearts that we would break up because I’d be of the mind that you were not pulling your weight in the kitchen.”

The frightening reality of it, as he saw it, was that if ever they were to date it would likely lead to ‘ _till death do us part’_. This was not to say that he heard wedding bells ringing in John’s shrill voice, but rather, that any sort of union between them would inevitably end in a double homicide. Simcoe’s eyes, normally so frighteningly fixed flickered around the room, settling on him, the match, the cityscape visible in the windowed outer wall for mere seconds before seeking refuge somewhere else. He looked past Hewlett to the bed he never seemed to bother himself with making. Hewlett swallowed another shot of Norwegian liquor and passed the bottle to the sometimes-friend he had sent into shock with a chaste kiss.

He should have let him bleed it out for a few more days, he considered, as he looked at the scar he’d created to conceal another.

At least then Simcoe might have been able to contain his suffering as an Englishman ought.

“Then it seems I know you better than you know yourself,” Simcoe said lightly, though, it seemed, not to him. Hewlett questioned if the man truly knew him at all. He reflected on his unspoken sentiment, on the musings and memories that had risen in reaction to his captain’s little speech. Parts of it had seemed truly irrational. He could not imagine ever getting John excited over physical sciences – which, though he could not imagine completely evaded his intellect, seemed to intimidate him in a way Hewlett could not place. Parts, however, had seemed ideal. Hewlett again allowed himself to imagine his nights filling with the kind of scholarly discussions and debates normally restricted to transfer windows. He secretly loved how Simcoe never failed to surprise him when he spoke in or about poetic verse, filling holes in his comprehension that he had never known himself to have. He loved how Simcoe spoke of him serving the sort of domestic role he had always been desperate to cast. Desperate, he thought. Then distant. It did not escape Hewlett that he was the very the demon who created this dichotomy, who had soiled Simcoe’s psyche in a manner time could not repair. He loved him. And he didn’t. And he feared it might be mutual if only because Simcoe seemed given to mimicking his worst behaviours.

Perhaps his foil’s doubts were warranted.

Perhaps he did in fact know him better than he knew himself – only seeing the sides to Hewlett that he personally could not face.

But what Simcoe certainly did not know, must not know was that Hewlett would rather be miserable with him than reasonably content with anyone else.

He loved him. And he didn’t. He wanted to tell him of every confused desire that overtook his active mind, but instead, he quipped, coward that he was, “That well may be, but I know what constitutes as nutrition for you.”

To which Simcoe shrugged, “Are you still on about the wheat-bread?”

There, Hewlett thought. The battle was over without either of them having fired a shot. Simcoe finished the remained of his beer in a single sip. Hewlett rose. He took the bottle with his own to the open kitchen, rinsed them in the sink and returned with replacements.  Excepting for the case of Newcastle, the refrigerator was empty. Perhaps it was for the best.

“The bread? No, that you suffered alone,” Hewlett smiled, taking a seat beside his host. Simcoe’s fingers nervously twitched against the beer bottle he had been handed. Hewlett swallowed. He had to set things right, at least, he had to restore their equilibrium. “This is more about what you chose to call ‘currywurst’ when I came round to watch the semis with you end of last season,” he said dismissively. Simcoe stared at him, at the space between them, seeming for the first time to comprehend the idea of personal distance as Hewlett realised that he, too, was in the habit of physically placing himself far too close. Of being too comfortable in spaces that were not his to define.

“When?” Simcoe asked, accepting the treaty despite the surge in occupation. Hewlett scooted himself back.

Simcoe looked hurt.

Hewlett frowned, wondering aloud if his friend had cooked – in the loose definition of heating food slightly above room temperature - on more than one occasion or, more likely, if memory in her kindness had spared him the details of this particular act of sadomasochism. “Ah,” he muttered as he tried to remember any detail of that fateful day beyond the lukewarm fires of hell he had unwittingly set upon his tongue, “Bayern at home against Barça two -three … maybe … bunch of the lads were here …”

“No. Three – two, but five-three on aggregate,” Simcoe corrected with a mocking smile, as though the act of remembering the exact details of a Champions League fixture neither of them particularly cared about from the previous season was worth the conceit and condescension he seemed to find within it. Hewlett would have been equally as smug, but this failed to register with him.

“I recall that you were being particularly contrary in cheering on the Catalans,” Simcoe continued briskly, “but I hardly see how that reflects upon my currywurst.”

Simcoe’s currywurst, as Hewlett reminded him, had consisted of two packages of Oscar Mayer Wieners sliced thin, left swimming in Sriracha and cooked in the microwave for seven minutes, leaving the device to look as though it – rather than the living room where the ‘dish’ was served – had been the site of a massacre. Still, somehow, it had barely been able to qualify as warm. Simcoe had defended his creation to his victims by stating that Oscar Mayer sounded like a German, he could not find curry on the spice rack at the local grocer’s and had to make due with chili, which, conveniently, came bottled. He then went about arguing why Juve had stood a better shot at beating the Bavarians, a position he evidently still maintained.

“Though now I suppose we will never know,” Simcoe said sullenly. Hewlett narrowed his eyes. No one was that naïve. 

“What – no? No,” he gaped. “We _do_ know. Statistically,” he said harshly, holding up his index finger for emphasis, “there was a real - however slight - advantage in playing the Spanish side. I’m not to blame for the fact that they lost in the final.”

At least this fight was familiar.

It was how things were between them. It was damaged and they were damned. Neither of them had had any personal stake in the semi-finals, for that matter, even the eventual winner of the UEFA Champions League. Neither of the clubs they individually supported would – presumably – ever qualify for that competition. But their Sunday squad had an understanding that everyone would stand behind whoever’s team went the furthest, Akinbode had an eight-year old faded Juventus air freshener hanging from the reverse mirror of his ride, and so, Edmund Hewlett found himself arguing for perhaps the hundredth time since the final whistle blew what conditions might have allowed the Italians to take the trophy in Berlin. It was fruitless. But familiar.

It was how things were between them.

Hewlett had a feeling – Sunday league solidarities aside - that were the Reds to make it in Europe Simcoe would cheer on whomever they opposed. He had a feeling he would behave in much the same manner if it were the Rangers, but then there was no chance that would ever be tested.

“Oh, bravo Edmund,” Simcoe taunted, “I’ll remind you of this when next you seek to tell me that statistics isn’t maths.”

This, too, was often a topic of debate. Simcoe had a bachelor’s degree in econ that had somehow equated to the sort of job in finance with seven-figure bonuses. Hewlett held five master’s and currently taught at Columbia where he was pursuing his doctorate. He earned slightly less than most of his undergraduate students did tending bar and waiting tables. They measured success differently. They worked with different sorts of numbers and figures in nearly every aspect of their lives and this fact had lead to a fundamental schism.

Hewlett grinned openly. It was his favourite stage set in their theatre.

“As I’ll remind you that while it may depend on maths, statistics is the science of understanding variation, to which I’ll add you clearly don’t – at least when it comes to footy,” he belittled him, reaching to the cluttered coffee table for his beer. When he leaned back he felt Simcoe’s arm where he had excepted a pillow. It gave him pause. His posture straightened. “This is why we could never … you know. This is why I won’t kiss you.”

“Because we have a difference of opinion over numerical data?”

“The very fact that numerical data can allow for a difference of opinion proves my stance,” Hewlett said smugly, “but no. No that is not what I meant.”

“My cooking?” Simcoe sneered, “You realise … everyone who was drinking beer that morning had no trouble eating it.”

“I had to work,” Hewlett said sheepishly.

“You teach; if I recall my university experience with any degree of accuracy I’d practically call day-drinking a prerequisite.”

“Sure,” Hewlett answered, accepting the half-embrace without making eye contact. He loved him and he didn’t. But it was easier to lie. “It is your cooking.”

“I could learn,” Simcoe replied after an eternity of thirty seconds in which nothing filled the air but the sound of the excitable commentator talking in rapid Spanish, presumably about Henderson’s failed pass - something Hewlett would have expected Simcoe to ridicule. But he had put his expectations elsewhere. Hewlett wondered briefly if this was for the better, what with Les Blues controlling possession. No. The match they were watching only lasted ninety minutes. There was no end date or exit strategy for the struggle Simcoe seemed set upon, mad dog that he was.

“You could learn,” Hewlett said without interest, “but you wouldn’t.”

“No,” Simcoe agreed. “But I’d take you to a food truck if you were thus inclined.”

“Ah – no, I - ah, I imagine I’ll never eat another currywurst again as long as I live. Curry anything if I can so much as help it.”

“And yet here you are,” Simcoe smiled.

“Like a few seeds of a pomegranate, I swear.”

His eyes drifted back to John and lingered too long. Still shirtless, he had the full length of his legs crossed over the coffee table, making them seem longer still. Arrogant smirk aside, Hewlett could all but consider him physically perfect – could, but for the colour and cut of his hair and the unseemly amount of it concealing the intricacies of his torso. He blushed, feeling inadequate by comparison. Simcoe straightened with a throwaway insult about Hewlett’s love of the ‘old gods’, spoken in such a way as to suggest that he had actually at least attempted Gaiman or Martin or any number of the other modern authors he mocked Hewlett for indulging in. With this consideration, Simcoe suddenly seemed to possess some measure of divinity himself. He was the Hades to Hewlett’s Persephone. He was Adonis. No. Astardu – sexuality and warfare, of which there was no equivalent in Western antiquity. He was perfect. Almost.

Hewlett felt himself warming for the first time since the icy November air had taken quarter in his bones. He slid out of the blanket the covered his shoulders and, without rising or lifting his eyes from the vision before him, slipped off his coat. Simcoe met his eyes expectantly. Hewlett knew he should speak, if only to save himself from chocking on the words cluttering his mind and throat. He could feel his face reddening, wondering how much he could pass off on the alcohol, considering, temporarily, that there might in fact be something to Simcoe’s base beliefs in medical treatment.

Simcoe’s lips parted. He had to strike. He had to defend what business he had staring as he was. But a compliant, even a backhanded one, would be taken as an invitation for Simcoe to advance, or worse, to talk about CrossFit.  Hewlett’s head shook with the shutter that ran down his spine at the thought. How, he questioned himself, could he possibly find anything desirable in someone who on repeat occasions had tried to get him to go to the _gym?_

It was disgusting.

“Ah – yes um, as to currywurst,” he stalled. “You remember I dated a Kraut once. Almost. Ended rather … badly, ironically also do to football.”

“Bayern fan?”

“Ah – Ninety-Six if I recall correctly, it is not really relevant.”

“Wait,” Simcoe perked up, “Is this the bloke who called the pub for you during the World Cup to make you and the rest of the world listen to his car-horn?”

“Um … no, no, that was an old mentor of mine. I, well, I almost dated his sister.”

“Your lot really do like to keep it in the family, don’t you?”

“Don’t,” Hewlett spat. Simcoe raised his hands in a mocking mimic of surrender.

“So how did you ‘almost’ break up? You and the sister,” he asked after chasing the remnants of what had been a nearly full bottle of Aquavit an hour before with a sip of beer. Both men stared at the bottle in wonder. Hewlett hope his mercy had truly been merciful, that he had poured a hearty amount into Simcoe’s wound prior to his makeshift surgery, that the pain he imagined his crush and crutch as having been in upon his arrival would not transfer to his own head within the next few hours.

“Fuck,” he said. Simcoe looked at him to continue. Hewlett took the bottle and placed it under the table, out of sight, as he briskly offered a distraction from all that they had brought onto themselves at his own expense, “Shortly before I moved state-side, she had gotten a job heading up Red Bull’s Aerospace Division.”

“Come again?” Simcoe demanded, placing his hand on Hewlett’s chest as though he meant to physically restrain him from carrying on with the narrative before clearing up some finer points.

“Um … right so we actually met -” he started, now regretting having mentioned his most recent liaison in the first place.

“No. I’ll let you cast yourself as a tragic romantic hero in a moment as you are so in want to … as though you think it is going to excite my jealousies, but quick question,” he said, growing serious. Sceptical. “Does Red Bull realise they are a soft drink company?”

“Your guess is really as good as mine, but you can google it,” he said as Simcoe leaned forward in search of his phone. “They really do have a space program, better funded than that of most nations.”

“Of all the oddities to come from globalisation,” Simcoe murmured. His eyes widened as he scrolled. “Hold up. No you didn’t,” he laughed, “No you bloody well did not, sir. Caroline Herschel? She is fit! You didn’t!”

“I didn’t,” Hewlett conceded. “As I said it ended when it had barely begun. We’d snogged a few times, maybe gone on two dates before she went to Salzburg and I to New York. Ah, we Skyped a ton at first but then … she, ah, let me know that she could get tickets to any Red Bull sponsored sporting event … and I sort of took advantage, only -”

“It’s a bloody soft drink company,” Simcoe insisted with a considerable measure of hard judgement. Hewlett wondered if he was aware that his own employer was more renowned for lending its name to the Premiership than it was for mismanaging money, but there was an easier way to sort this matter. John Graves Simcoe understood just enough about the hard sciences to be easily subdued by talk of any of them.

“A soft drink company,” Hewlett agreed, “who will do about anything to distract us from the fact that their product is nothing but bovine testosterone, sugar and soda water.”

“This is why we never talk about science,” Simcoe said, looking rather ill. Hewlett smiled. He’d won. With any luck, John would take his sick to the toilet and expel enough of it to save himself from next-morning regret. Sometimes, he fancied, mercy tasted sweet. Sometimes, however, it tasted like Scandinavian alcohol mixed with stomach acid.

“Oh we talk about science all the time, old friend,” he taunted as he took off his blazer, hiding his Burberry under a couch cushion from someone who suddenly looked as though he might not make it to the loo.  “For some incomprehensible reason you elect to call it ‘maths’, but in the spirit of digression, that you might sleep at night -”

“I’ll have no trouble doing so as I’ll never have an energy drink again.”

“Taurine – which come from the Latin _taurus_ , meaning bull -”

“Christ, I didn’t mean I wanted to fall asleep right yet,” Simcoe said sarcastically, as he was want to in tone every time Hewlett brought up dead languages, “I’m trying to watch this match while you try to illustrate to me _how little kisses matter to you_.” His stare hardened. His voice deepened in such a way as to almost suggest he had gone through puberty in a surprisingly short time span. “You talk as though whatever happened between yourself and Frau Dr Herschel alters anything that just happened between _us_.”

“Nothing happened between _us_ ,” Hewlett insisted.

“You kissed me, Edmund, and while you might have known that such feelings could … exist in, in this way for any length of time, I’ve only just discovered it for myself,” he stopped. Swallowed. When he spoke again, his voice had regained its rather effeminate air, though the acid failed to exit. “Rather than help me process this information properly,” he accused, “you complain about the one time I did try to prepare a meal on my own as a way of stating that you wouldn’t break up with me though you claim I am not what you want. You allege that it is I who am confused yet -”

“John. You’re not bi, you’re buzzed. I have half a mind to stream Lola at half time to convince you of that not-so-insignificant obstacle to any ideas you might have. Nothing happened between us, and nothing will,” he paused, “but perhaps, in some alternative universe very similar to our own with the sole alteration being that -”

“You weren’t a coward?”

“Fine,” Hewlett sighed. “If that is how you wish the phrase it.”

He finished his beer in silence redirecting his attention to the match. He assumed John had done the same until Pogba took a shot on goal. When he failed to cheer or comment on the miscalculation taken by Juventus’s top player, Hewlett turned, surprised at the silence. Simcoe had not moved since their conversation had taken on a passive form. His concentration remained fixed.

“I wouldn’t leave you. If we dated,” he said, placing a hand on Simcoe’s kneecap. “That is the trouble with it. I couldn’t imagine things changing too terribly much between us regardless of whatever sort of eventuality we might face, nor, truly, would I want them too. But that is the whole problem isn’t it? Nothing would change and yet everything would. Suddenly it wouldn’t be that we have few other close friends to speak of because I’m socially awkward and you’re borderline psychotic, we’d be … obsessive … ah, possessive of one another in a rather off-putting way – which, granted, is already the case I fear, but if we were romantically involved it would read as ‘abusive’ rather than just lads being lads, yea? I can’t have that, and you – well certainly!”

“Why do you worry so much about what people think?” Simcoe demanded, “Why do you allow yourself to be so intimidated by the fickle and fluid options of insignificance? Why are you,” his voice grew quiet, “why are you – the weakest man I’ve ever in my life been forced to endure – seemingly the only person in the world who isn’t afraid of me?”

Because we are both hopelessly lonely, Hewlett thought.

“I’m a coward,” he said. “Fine. I’m afraid to kiss you. I’m afraid to spend the night, to listen to you recite some translation of _Coe_ -tullus,” he stopped, embarrassed, continuing after a second told him that the Freudian slip went unnoticed, “that you’ll tell me how I’ve been misinterpreting or failing to fully comprehend the grammatical nuances of poetry for the whole of my existence. I’m afraid that I’ll enjoy it all too much. To that end, I’m afraid of letting you share in all of _my_ hobbies and academic interests because I feel you already have so bloody much of me I’d have nothing left of myself. I’m afraid you’re fears are misplaced - if we were together, I’d never leave and you’d never let me and we would come to resent one another for that reason. I’m afraid to call that love.”

“What if that is what love _is_?” Simcoe questioned.

“I’m afraid of that as well.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Oh, my gosh … at this point, I think it safe to assume that their inhibitions should have sunken well below wherever the figurative line lay. That, or Hewlett’s mercy was truly merciful and he poured the majority of what had remained in the flash out like he hoped, saving both him and Simcoe from a hard morning and a few hard realisations … nah.
> 
> I linked to the contextual notes in the beginning, but if you need a refresher on anything, here it is [again](https://tavsancuk.tumblr.com/post/164825197280/so-the-notes-to-the-coming-chapter-of-forty-proof).
> 
> Before I go though, I just wanted to say thank you so much for the response to this fic. I honestly had no expectations of it, and I am sure if I had you all would have far exceeded anything I could have ever hoped for with your comments and kudos. **So, thank you so much!** I hope this update and the one’s that will follow continue to provide as entertaining for you to read as they are for me to write. Cheers.
> 
> XOXO - Tav


	6. Chapter 6

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Simcoe and Hewlett argue over poetry, puns and assorted other topics in order to avoid (or delay) the inevitable. And then it happens. (And the crowd goes wild.)

“The literary genre that demands ‘active’ participation - that is drama you are thinking of. While I agree the Bard can be read as both, poetry can –and perhaps should - be enjoyed alone and in silence,” Edmund Hewlett scoffed as he again removed the bag of peas that could now be said to be cooking against the heat of Simcoe’s skin. He made a small frown as he studied the area once covered by flesh, fur and blood – presumably, Simcoe thought, angered by the reality that although he had twice held a blade to his enemy’s heart he had failed to slay his demon. Simcoe reasoned that in one of Hewlett’s multiverses in which their recent fates were switched, he would suffer the same regret. No, he thought bitterly. If he were ever blessed with an opportunity to rid himself of the prissy, pretentious little Scotsman he would not let it pass.

Not under any set of hypothetical circumstances.

And certainly not twice.

Simcoe returned the look he was being given only to be asked once again if he was warm enough in a tone that suggested he might do well to put a shirt on. Simcoe considered this unspoken implication for its merits – dressing would save him from the torment of his teammate’s touch, but Hewlett’s curiosity quickly turned to aggravation without him having to exert any effort to that outcome. He smiled and nodded and this caused his guest’s brow to knot, making his forehead far more interesting than the football friendly which had gotten off to a slow start. Simcoe wondered how many of Hewlett’s fine lines and grey hairs he could credit himself with and arrived at an estimation that rivalled the number of stars in the sky. Hewlett had to fight against his cowardice and supposed morality to so much as hold a weapon whereas Simcoe could easily scar with an ill-intentioned smile. This realization brought him a familiar comfort as he considered how and when he might convey this in whatever manner might wound the most.

Hewlett sighed. He placed hand to Simcoe’s forehead, realised in the same instant that he had just been holding a bag of cold (if no longer frozen) vegetable. He attempted to incorporate his lips once again into his nursing, but Simcoe had grown board with being the butt of this particularly unkind joke and pushed him aside.

“Please stop behaving as though you care,” he said briskly at a higher octane than that which ordinarily characterized his distinctive falsetto, “I grow weary of your lies.”

“John … I, it’s not …” Hewlett began, his mouth shifted as though to suggest more words would follow, but expectation failed. He took the bag from the cluttered coffee table where he had unceremoniously lain it and put the peas back atop the new scar tissue he had created, careful not to let his hands or eyes linger. He redirected his attention back to the game and let out a small, frustrated sigh that served to Simcoe’s irritation.

“And as to your attempt at a rebuttal,” he continued in a tone that pierced both his ears and his ego, “I don’t recall once stating that poetry must be read aloud. In assuming that such was meant by my critique of your ‘passive’ approach you only illustrate your ignorance and ineptitude when it comes to connecting with verse.”

Hewlett frowned but seemed other content to avoid conversation.

He had been right about torture, Simcoe realised after a few moments passed in silence while they watched a ball on the screen being passed between French players (a skill, Hewlett muttered rightly, that failed the English game.) Simcoe thought to rebuke his guest for the comment, but wondered if in doing so he would be confessing that he truly could not tolerate being ignored.

Eventually, it became too much.

“Oyster, are you so eager to accept defeat?” he baited.

“Why is this important to you?” Hewlett snapped. “Presently, I mean. Why try to engage me in argument when I am ‘actively’ trying to watch the friendly? What we had planned on doing,” he paused, adding “Together.”

“When have we ever actually watched sport together, Oyster?” Simcoe asked aridly. He leaned up slightly, reached out and flicked the elbow of his guest with his middle and index fingers, making a snapping sound and causing Hewlett to let out a small, shrill sound.

“We’ve … ah, we’ve managed to keep our arguments constrained to matches in the past,” Hewlett replied, wincing as he rubbed against his sting.

“Hardly. You don’t understand shite about the beautiful game.”

“This coming from a man carded in every match. You don’t know the rules.”

“I know the value of winning,” Simcoe grinned.

“But that is the beauty of the game though, isn’t it?” Hewlett challenged. “It is the only area of life – of my experience with this world at least – where you can win within a set structure. There is a purity that you seek to deny and for that, Captain, I truly pity you.”

Simcoe had not expected his mockery to be met with pseudo-philosophy that might have bordered on passion had these words not been spoken by these particular lips.

“Is that why you play?” Simcoe asked almost hesitantly, hoping Hewlett would not admit to having hidden depths.

“Well I suppose so. That and it reminds me of home.”

“It reminds of the barracks,” Simcoe replied after taking a moment to consider what ‘home’ mean to him. “Of the military. I didn’t play as a boy, I … had aspirations then, to enlist. Of fighting battles that had a bloody objective. The market, as I am sure you realise, is a zero-sum game. There is no order to it and little if any reason. You win and you lose constantly, simultaneously, it is soulless and made worse by the absence in comradery and the lack of real consequence once you get into the area of regular seven-figure bonuses and eight-figure salaries. In sport you fight as a team, victories are real and defeats avoidable. And it is bloody violent,” he smiled. “That is as decent of a selling point as any other I can think of.”

Hewlett’s fingertips passed lightly, unconsciously, over the back of his hand. Simcoe had not noticed them until he had finished speaking. He grabbed at them with his own. Hewlett did not fight for his release.

“Why didn’t you?” he asked.

“What then?” Simcoe said as he studied the fingers intertwined in his. Hewlett’s were calloused by comparison. While he knew this to be from the screwdrivers and pens he handled in service of his studies, he felt a twinge of envy when Hewlett spoke the word “Enlist” for clarification. It was as though he were called back to the front he had always hoped to find himself on. He pictured his hands as being equally battle-worn to the one he held. He frowned.

“Ah, I didn’t mean – if you, um -” Hewlett stuttered.

“I didn’t pass the psychological evaluation. They wouldn’t take me.”

“Oh, God – John, I’m sorry … that makes sense … I didn’t -”

Simcoe wondered where Hewlett found ‘sense’ in his short explanation. “Yea, it is just another bloody reason I don’t believe there is any validity to the so-said science,” Simcoe interrupted, taking his hand back and crossing his arms in offence, “I don’t know what they were looking for or what they think they found.”

Hewlett squinted. He began to speak several times before any of his syllables found their way into words. “I - I am speechless.”

One could hope, Simcoe thought, but he would not surrender his to a lost cause.

“I came into your flat today mate to find you with your hand in your trousers imagining that the blood coming out of the infected cut on your chest had been inflicted by some tart on your telly -”

“That is what people do when they watch porn, old friend,” the Englishman interrupted. This seemed to confuse Hewlett more, but then his rival, or so he reasoned, only seemed to get himself off to animated war documentaries. Simcoe attempted to explain what it was to engage one’s fantasy with a suitable visual stimulus, but these words were wasted on their audience.

“Not when they need to go to hospital!” Hewlett exclaimed.

Simcoe considered he really should have bothered himself to get dressed. “You bugger! I thought we had moved past that,” he replied. “You’re not still trying to get me -”

“No. You forced me to cauterize the wound on your balcony – from which, by the by, I can see three fully proper facilities -” Hewlett stopped. He brought a hand to his temples and attempted to smooth out his stress lines. “And however you may otherwise argue you insistence on handling things at home,” he said, half into his hand, “you really can’t deny that the reasons when someone might be tempted to deem you psychologically unfit are multiple and apparent.”

“I can when I consider the people I was at school with who _did_ make cut … which doesn’t include you, dose it?”

“I was too young to preform my service when I left school,” Hewlett defended. “I assumed that I would after I had obtained my undergraduate degree but clearly that did not work out as planned due to medical complications. Of all of the sorrows I have … admittedly I, ah - I can’t pretend that missing out on the military is really among them.”

“Because you still have footy?” Simcoe suggested.

“Because I still have _you_.”

Simcoe sat up and took his beer from the table. It had grown warm which his British passport could tolerate but his American residency could not. He did his best to wrap the bag of peas that had been laying on his chest around his and Hewlett’s half-consumed bottles. “That might be the nicest thing you have ever said to me,” he said, feeling his sometimes-friends stare and fearing that he might otherwise think this a opportune moment to explain heat transfer in highly specialised and specific terminology. Or in Latin.

“It wasn’t intended as such,” Hewlett said as he took his beer from its newly constructed winter palace. Simcoe watched as he swallowed the half that remained in a single sip. 

“That could be it though. The reason I find myself – that I find you so,” he stopped before he slipped.

“I fill the void in your life created by the absence of armed conflict? That’s why I’m attractive, is it then?” Hewlett laughingly surmised.

“I hate to be the one to break this to you but you’re not,” Simcoe said flatly. “Perhaps taken individually your features might prove striking at best, but the combination they create … how to put this delicately? Do you remember those books of abstract paintings they used to sell at tourist shops? The ones where if you stared long and hard enough you might chance see a boat, or at least pretend to when others claim they have. That is the very effect I get from your … face.” It was a half-truth. Simcoe could spend hours studying the man beside him specifically because he knew all of his quirks. What he did not know was why he found them so compelling. He feared that this - rather than pretending a girl who worked at the local pub would one day do the kinds of things to him he had seen in porn – was what love was. He again felt ill at the thought of pending a rather dismal eternity arguing about everything and nothing with some bloke he could not stand – worse still that as with all of his relationships, the sentiment was one sided. Hewlett did not much care if he was there or not.

“Is that why you never blink?” Hewlett asked, unbothered by the insult.

“Could well be.”

“Well, I suppose that is fair. Maybe you ought to use your powers for good, yea? Watch the game for long enough and the Three Lions might appear to be a proper national team,” he suggested, patting Simcoe’s kneecap as he moved to rise. “I’ll go get us another beer.”

Simcoe grabbed his hand, stopping him from leaving. “That is an unrealistic expectation if I’ve ever heard one,” he said of the English side.

“Christ! _Simcoe_ ,” Hewlett demanded, hissing his surname, “What is it that you _want_?”

Hewlett wrinkled is face in such a way as to call to mind every monster of mythology and folklore. Endearing though he found the expression, Simcoe turned away lest he suffer some fate similar. Reluctantly, he released Hewlett’s hand only to have it waved before his eyes.

“What I want?” he repeated slowly as he batted away the obstacle to his vision. “Why … to watch the best English footballers take on … Arsenal?”

Hewlett sat and squinted. “Come to mention it.”

“I was preparing to make a PSG joke but Wanger seems to have a certain preference.”

“Point,” Hewlett conceded. “Les Blues aren’t Die Mannshaft though, they don’t concentrate their talent pool to such a degree – look Arsenal, PSG, even Bayern. Hm. And… they’ve Paul Pogba. You heard the rumours that United want him back?”

He had not.

Half of what Hewlett said was bullocks, or so he tired to calm himself. He suddenly wished to speak of physics, which he could not follow, or poetry, which Hewlett did not properly comprehend, rather than over a topic in which they were both fluent. He thought to text Anna Strong an apology he did not owe her so that he and his friend might be able to watch the next match at the pub where distractions from the English game would extend beyond one another.

“How can you hear something like that and honestly believe that a God exists?” Simcoe asked, burring his face in his hands. He felt Hewlett’s arm reach around his shoulders in an attempt at comfort.

“Have you ever read the old testament?” he asked, implying the threat of the Red Devils taking a title was equivalent to a plague – a rather reasoned argument.

“He is class though,” Simcoe said begrudgingly. He shook himself free from the faux-affection. Hewlett did not fight it, to his surprise disappointment.

Instead, he simply nodded. “If I’m to be completely honest, much as I’d rather England win this test, if I don’t see a Pogball I shall be severely disappointed.”

“A _Pogball_?” Simcoe questioned, eyebrows raised.

“Yea, when he shots it into the corner as he does,” Hewlett clarified by demonstrating, running two of his long fingers across the palm of his opposite hand.

“That’s brilliant,” Simcoe consented, both of the French midfielder’s standard play and the fact that some wise-arse had coined such a term with which to describe it, repeating the word again beneath his breath. He would need to remember to use it the next time Juve were paying an English club in the Champion’s League – or, if Hewlett were right, after the transfer had taken place. He would say it flatly as not to show that he found the joke particularly clever. With any luck, he would get Akinbode to smile, Appleton to laugh, and André to finish whatever drink was in his hand after hissing a string of undo denunciations. That would stop Hewlett from taking credit for something that he likely had not originated.

“You like that, huh?” Hewlett continued to speak without inflection, although his face twisted, with threats of breaking its carefully constructed composure, “Perhaps if you played in Serie A as opposed to in the Long Island Sunday League they would call the whole bloody sport Calci- _coe_.”

“No,” Simcoe spat. The last joke was better. Hewlett smiled as though he considered it warranted.

“Ah, quite right, forgive me; the Italians can’t quite match your style. I’m certain we can agree though that were this set in Spain they would sim,” he paused, “-ply need to renamed their derby -”

“Say El Classi _coe_ and I’ll ensure it is the last word you ever speak.”

“Really? I always imagined you would be rather keen on word-play, grammar Nazi that you are.”

“What are you on about?”

“I teach maths to undergraduates for a living. Nearly every text or email I send reads ‘ok thx’ – it is only with you that I have to remember to use auto- _coe_ rrect for fear of otherwise making myself and object of mo _coe_ ry.”

“Will you stop saying words quite in that way?” 

“Careful,” Hewlett cautioned, raising his index finger. “ _Coe_ vetousness isn’t becoming.”

“Edmund,” he said sharply as he shoved him. Hewlett took no time to recover from the hit and retaliated with, “Ah, I was just thinking the same. Let’s _coe_ ddle. I’m -”

“Don’t.”

“ _Coe_ ld.”  

“Is this truly how you wish to die?”

“I’d take it as a _coe_ mpliment.”

“You need to _hew_ -let this rest,” Simcoe said, rather pleased with his little attempt. Hewlett smiled.

“It has something of a _coe_ mmunicable illness to it, punning, does it not?”

“Once I get the hang of this I am going to _hew_ -miliate you constantly, you do realise that.”

“I welcome it; puns are the highest form of literature, as they say.”

“Right … _Coe_ tullus,” Simcoe nodded slowly, “I see what you did there now.”

Hewlett blushed. Simcoe wondered if he had said something unintentionally amorous or offensive. Images his tortured mind had conjured of the life he and Hewlett might share returned to him and caused him to question if he had just been flirting.

“To be completely honest … that was a Freudian slip on my part.”

“You think of me that much?” Simcoe mocked. No. Teased. He was flirting. And Hewlett was answering his tone.

“Not even in the confines of my own mind can I find sanctuary,” the Scot said lightly.

Simcoe noticed how close to Hewlett he was sitting and yet how very far away he felt. He was not wanted. He wanted to end this. It had to. He turned back to the television, hoping that he would not see Hewlett entangled in his arms on some morning when they were both back in London. He hoped he would not imagine cuddling him closer in search of the warmth they had otherwise denied themselves in kicking the comforter from the bed in a fight or fit of passion the night before. He could almost hear Hewlett complain over the sound of raindrops hitting the window frame that he did not want to get up until he appeased him with offers of toast and tea. And then in the kitchen they would argue about whatever was in the news. And he would be happy.

He had to end this before it ended him. “It is the same reason … I like sport, that I like poetry -”

“Opportunity for violence?” Hewlett snorted.

No, Simcoe explained, though there were certain other aspects of a standing army he saw in verse. In poetry, one was challenged to convey the chaos inherent in the flaw of human perception within a strict structure. As a reader, one had to think around the writer in a way that failed other genres. It was a fight. It was single combat. “You had to pay attention to small shifts in grammar, to interpret the words through what was shown by their arrangement rather than said.  Here, for example, our old friend switches from active to passive verb forms in the second line of his most famous work,” he said before reciting a poem that had always reminded him very much of the man beside him, even before he had been open to acknowledging why.

He hated and he loved, and Hewlett was too stubborn, selfish and stupid to warrant any of it.

“Perhaps my efforts are wasted,” Simcoe taunted to hide his hurt. “I don’t imagine the themes speak to you - owing nothing to adage that no one can enjoy Catullus after thirty. Ignoring why it would be structurally impossible without weakening the work, it would take on a different meaning entirely were the verbs hate and love switched in the first line, maybe one you could better appreciate.”

“No relationship is based in hate,” Hewlett said softly after taking a moment to reflect.  

“I … hate a lot of people,” Simcoe roused.

“Not people who you chose to have in your life.”

“John André,” he said flatly.

“Don’t you only go to anger management because of a court order?” Hewlett squinted.

“It started out that way, but you are there and -”

“I normalize it for you.”

“What the fuck does that mean?” Simcoe demanded. “Honestly, I go trying to protect you from your own naïve superstitions -”

“Why don’t you believe in psychology?”

“Why don’t you believe in horoscopes?”

Hewlett shrugged and shook his head. “I am a man of science, I -”

“But it is the same shit, isn’t it? An attempt to explain why we do things when the reality is that everyone just does what serves to fulfil them. If I find myself in an altercation it has to do with the particulars of the present moment - not my father’s death or my star sign or anything else one might try to pin with excuse or blame.”

“No reasonable person constantly behaves in a manner advantageous to his desires,” Hewlett reflected. It was no fun when he was demoralised by his own demons Simcoe sulked. “You can only argue that reason to it because you don’t work in finance. People make decisions all the time that services no logic beyond sudden whims.”

Hewlett tried to turn away, but Simcoe grabbed his shoulder. “There is more to be considered between us than happiness,” the sullen Scot said.

“There is not. There is something here that you yourself initiated but now seek to deny as you are happier with your questions and cowardice than you think you could be with me. Or is it that you tremble in fear at the thought of my vengeful lust?”

“Pretending for a moment that I subscribe to any aspect of this ludicrous theory of yours,” Hewlett leaned in as he spoke, “You know what I think John? I think you are ‘happier’ calling out what you perceive as my weakness because it spares you from confronting the reality of your feelings yourself.”

“Are you calling _me_ a coward?”

“No, I’m quoting from the Aeneid – _audentis Fortuna iuvat_.”

As much as he resented being forced to cross the battle line, he respected his opponents move. He grabbed Hewlett by the back of the neck and brought him to his lips. For a few breathless seconds he felt his tongue fight against Hewlett’s in a way which required rather little wit.

Victory was at hand.

Hewlett seemed ready to submit. He pulled him closer. He could already hear the cheering of his countrymen in his mind. He had won. The cheering grew until certainty broke the spell. He had not imagined it. Hewlett broke their embrace as the commentator spoke the only word of Spanish Simcoe knew.

“We scored?” Hewlett asked.

“Well … not yet,” he smiled. His guest looked odd and uncomfortable. John Graves Simcoe was begining to like word games quite a bit indeed.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Ew. Cooties. 
> 
> Alright lovely faces, let’s do this fast – the French NT is called Les Blues, England nicknames itself The Three Lions and the German NT is called Die Mannschaft. (We used to be called Die National-Elf before we won the 2014 World Cup and some marketing genius thought that did not play well to a global audience. Pity.)
> 
> Arsenal is a team out of London, Arsène Wenger has been its trainer since I was a little, little kid and thought that the club was called after the English translation of his first name. This bit of the conversation implies that he favours French players, but really he is just keen on filling his squad with those prone to injury.
> 
> PSG stands for Paris Saint-Germain, which no one has ever actually called it to the extent of my knowledge. They have a lot of money and the success that comes with it.
> 
> FC Bayern is the team Benedict Arnold would support if he were alive today and into European football. They drew 2-2 yesterday so they are shite and they need to fire their manager.  
> (See?)
> 
> Pogba transferred from Juve to Man United in 2016, and Jesus wept. I think I actually annotated a lot of this in the last update? Been a while … tja.
> 
> Oh! The poem referenced is Catullus 85, it is the one Simcoe quotes in episode 2.9:  
> I hate and I love. Why do I do this, perhaps you ask.  
> I do not know, but I feel it happening and I am tortured.
> 
> Oh my bleeding heart!  
> We have about one or two chapters to go on this, so … now is the time to tell me if you have a pressing need for something particular before the lads sober up and never speak of this again outside of therapy. 
> 
> As always, thanks for reading! -Tav


	7. Chapter 7

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It started out with a kiss, how did it end up like this?  
> No but really, Simcoe and Hewlett reflect upon their short-lived romance in individual therapy sessions six days later.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> TW / CW : Minor sexual content

John Graves Simcoe was hesitant to admit how much his mind had been had been preoccupied with the anticipation of this moment, and for how long. From his place on the couch, he stared at the man seated across from him, the sides of his lips shifting into something that resembled a smile. “I kissed Oyster,” he said, verging on braggadocio. It had little effect on his audience.

Dr John André lifted his eyebrows but not his pen as he continued to scribble something Simcoe doubted had much to do with their session. When he finished, he asked without much interest, “And how does that make you feel?” before he returned his attention to the yellow legal pad balanced on his knee.

Simcoe felt betrayed by expectation. He felt that his admission warranted more than the verbal recitation of the question he had been asking himself since he felt his heart shatter against his best friend’s chapped lips. He had hoped to see repulsion reflected in André’s features - both for his base amusement, and to form the basis of an understanding over what had happened and what had not.

Tuesday morning returned to him and he could again feel its chill. André said nothing, but wrinkled his brow in such a way as to indicate curiosity. His head tilted slightly to the side. The paltry theatrics of his physical signals were insulting and Simcoe felt put off. His fingers tapped unrhythmically against the side of the couch as he mentally rose from his recollections.

“I was under the impression that my insurance carrier paid you to sort out such matters,” he chided, his voice chiming with pleasantries born of mild aggravation. He mimicked André’s inquiring expression, which – to his immense satisfaction – caused the good doctor’s to falter slightly.

“No John,” André sighed, “You were under the impression that your confession would break my professional composure and I would address this matter as your friend rather than as you psychologist.”

This gave Simcoe pause. His fingers continued to twitch. “What would you say then? _If_ ,” he clarified, stressing the conditional phrasing “we _were_ friends, you and I?”

André stiffened his shoulders. “Imagining from the aggression you brought to the pitch yesterday this happened sometime last week … I would ask you if you wouldn’t mind relaying that information to another mutual acquaintance of ours in order to settle a bet in my favour.”

“That is out of the question,” Simcoe replied. It occurred to him that this bet might well have been placed during one of the gaming nights in which he had been banned by his own bravado from taking part. Was the whole team having a laugh over them? Was Oyster in on the joke? No, he decided. This was more likely born from a bar side debate between André and Rogers, begging the questions of what he had personally done to offend them both so, and why the very idea of having his name tied to Hewlett’s in an in-joke from outside parties was so insulting.

Maybe because Hewlett had been laughing too, he thought.

André took out his wallet, “I would split the winnings with you. You could take your … boyfriend out perhaps. Rivington’s has a superb wine selection, something I’m sure your Edmund would appreciate,” he paused. “It is not about the money, it is a matter of principle -”

“Of which you _clearly_ have none,” Simcoe spat, saddened and sickened by the possessive pronoun the man who marked himself as an enemy insisted upon. He fixed his face into a glare.

“Indeed,” André said, replacing his wallet in his pocket. “Heed my _friendly_ advice about the restaurant, at least. It is exactly the sort of spot I imagine your – well, tell me, how would you classify your relationship with Edmund at this point?”

“I wouldn’t,” Simcoe replied at an octave that betrayed his uncertainty posed by André’s choice of phrasing. The kiss was made all the more repulsive by the fact that the doctor chose to associate the act with intimacy. Hewlett would never employ such language. Not with regard to them. Not at all. It was sick and sad and strange, anhedonic and almost braggingly self-centric. There was nothing between them. He felt dispirited by his delayed realisation.

André resumed his well-rehearsed demeanour, nodding at words that had yet to be spoken.

Simcoe sulked. He ought not to have mentioned it at all. He looked at the clock and saw that he still had fifty minutes of watching John André pretend to listen to what he would, in turn, pretend were his cares in order to satisfy the requirements of his court sentence.

 “He … he doesn’t – I’ve never felt alone in his company before and now that is all I feel. After kissing him. Alone. When we are together. And otherwise,” he said, straightening his posture slightly as he declared, “I realised, not very long into it –the snogging that is – that I don’t ‘love’ him, not … in that exact way. I was too embarrassed to admit it, that he had been right.”

“Do you believe that or do you simply wish me to?” André asked, attempting to sound rhetoric in his question.

Simcoe hardened his stare, wanting to unlearn everything he had been taught in anger-management therapy about impulse control. “I wish things to return to the way they were,” he answered. “Truth be told, I want you to tell me how they can.”

André squinted and made a slight, seemingly involuntary shake of his head. Simcoe smiled, wondering if he could make the shrink pull out the gin that he knew him to keep in his desk for discussions such as these. “To clarify – as they were, what with Hewlett stabbing you to punctuate an argument?”

At least then he had missed my heart, Simcoe thought to his own annoyance. He softly spoke this aloud and it appeared to trouble André. Simcoe tried to laugh at his own joke but found that he could not.

Perhaps he had failed its execution. “Good times,” he added lightly, sounding far less ironic than intended.

He remembered how it felt to hold him after anger and impulse had abandoned them both and doubts shifted from yearning to regret. He remember the exhilaration of the moments that proceeded it, how gladly Hewlett received his affections. It felt no different than he imagined it would in a dream he realised had rooted itself somewhere long ago. And that was the problem. His fantasies about Edmund had never been of romance but rather of escape- from societal expectations, from their shared past, from the threat of loneliness he had previously interpreted in the more literal sense of being alone. He felt himself longing for that ignorance, for the innocence he had not known possessed him until it had turned to fear.

They were together more than they were apart. He fretted over the distance that would soon exist between them; over the reality that mentally, somehow, it already did. He had pulled Hewlett closer, kissed him deeper in hopes that his doubts would subside. The sentiment was returned in force and this too made him ill. Edmund Hewlett did not fear him and he was the only person of whom this could be said. Hewlett would leave America for Britain. He would be gone and once farewells had all been said he would not afford him a second thought. Simcoe had realised that without Oyster he would have no company anymore outside of the Sundays on which he would lead his men into pitched battle; now, with the sad knowledge that they all got together now and again to enjoy each other’s company and the absence of his.

It hurt.

It hurt that Hewlett was every bit the man he had always known him to be, but for all of his Machiavellian and otherwise sociopathic tendencies he was neither feared nor respected in New York. He was human. He was allowed to be. He had friends who accepted his failings and social faux pas. He was the nearest he would ever know to normal.

He pulled Hewlett’s jersey over his head as the smaller man tried to pull back from the embrace.

 _‘John … no,’_ he said though he continued in his own physical advances, kissing Simcoe’s recently closed wound and sending shots of pain through him. He felt himself stiffen and Hewlett felt it too. His hand slipped down the waistband of Simcoe’s trousers and he began to handle him as he might himself. Simcoe let out a small cry of pleasure. Hewlett again said ‘ _no_ ’ and this time seemed to mean in, taking back his hand and folding it in the opposite arm protectively across his chest.

He was right about the true nature of torture; it was hell being so close to someone who gave so little of themselves. Hewlett then began to voice feelings he thought himself to have and that somehow made the pain worse.

 _‘I want to much more for you than this,’_ he said.

 _‘Then let me have it,_ ’ Simcoe suggested, at once teasing and begging. Hewlett tensed though his tone fell flat.

‘ _John you … you don’t understand_ ,’ he sniffed, ‘ _I’ve never – I’ve never before been with …_ ’

‘ _What with another man? Neither have I. I’ve, truth be told I never so much a considered it with anyone but you_ ,’ Simcoe admitted, at first relieved until it occurred to him that Hewlett took him for a fool. _‘You had Herschel,’_ he argued. _‘No, you had the other Herschel – sorry, I just, I had always assumed you were …’_

‘ _Bent? Not entirely, no._ ’ Hewlett buried his face in his hands. ‘ _I’m not – John I’m really nothing of what you are so keen to conclude. I’m a virgin. I never ‘had’ either Herschel to borrow your language. I have never ‘had’ anyone. I never will. Ah, you – you are such a physical presence I,- I should never have, I- I don’t know what to say beyond I’m sorry -_ ’

‘ _You’re not,’_ Simcoe interrupted. Of all the lies he assumed Hewlett of telling to absolve himself from intimacy, ‘sorry’ was the blackest and most blatant. _‘You just don’t want that I should ever get to share in your enjoyment. You are not sorry, Edmund. You are selfish. And for reasons I will never understand you feel this constant need to express it.’_

 _‘You’re right,’_ he said several times, shaking all the while.

It occurred to Simcoe that Hewlett was crying. He embraced him again only to be asked, ‘ _What are you doing?_ ’ to which he awkwardly replied, ‘ _Comforting you as you so clearly require._ ’ This made Hewlett sob and caused Simcoe to question once more what exactly he had done wrong.

_‘It isn’t you. It is providence. I’m on medication owing to my heart condition that make it impossible for me to sustain an erection. I’m on anti-depressants that do little to lighten my general melancholy but leave my sex-drive debilitated just enough that it is um … it is not ordinarily an issue in itself. But I’m lonely. So are you and that is all this is and can ever be, a reminder that isolation is all we can ever hope to share.’_

Simcoe found himself lost for words. He looked at his almost-lover in the way Hewlett looked at constellations, collecting specs of light separated by millennia to form a narrative. He had long known all of this, but had never taken these sad truths together as a single tragedy. Then, he had never had a reason to, or perhaps they had both been happy in some shared denial. He kissed Hewlett’s head softly, hugging him until his tears stopped as he tried not to share in them. The worst of it was that for all Edmund did to otherwise exile himself from affection; he had been beside him for so long he felt he belonged there. For a moment, he felt that Hewlett had long been in love with him and the mutuality of this was at once calming, crushing and confusing. Maybe this was what love was. Maybe this was why Hewlett was such a coward when faced with it.

‘ _You know … loath as I am to open the discussion to the topic of physical engineering, there are other … ways, we could configure … you may well find that submission suits you._ ’

_‘You would come to resent me.’_

_‘I already do.’_

_‘I know.’_

Everything made sense and yet nothing did. He crawled on top of Hewlett - who put up little protest - but whose skin suddenly felt cold. His saliva tasted sour. Simcoe realised that he would likely never have what he most feared losing. Hewlett would leave him. They always did.

“He is incapable of loving anyone but himself,” Simcoe declared finally, hoping that to be the end of it. André had long since stopped scribbling notes.

“How did it end?”

“Um. Two – Nil, for England. Rooney score shortly into the second half -”

“So it didn’t.”

“The fuck are you on about?”

“I’m … honestly surprised that Edmund allowed himself such intimacy at all, given his condition and how he has been made to feel about it in the past. He must trust you far more than he lets on,” André suggested.

“I’ve known him for over eighteen years, John. He is selfish and he misses no opportunity to display his undo sense of entitlement. That is all it was and will ever be.”

“Is it possible that you are the selfish one? Pretending – at least to me – that you don’t want to fight because you are too afraid to lose?”

“I’ve already lost,” Simcoe said, disappointed in himself for bearing his soul before the last person he would ordinarily allow to see him without his amour. “It isn’t love … or even loneliness it is,” he shifted, unable to find an appropriate explanation. “You know what the worst of it is? Hewlett is a virgin at thirty-four, which I’ll allow is itself sad – but the tragedy here is that I can’t even rightly employ that fact in the service of mockery.”

“You could, but you care for him.”

“I’m a warrior, yes, but not a monster,” Simcoe defended, disgusted. “I would never weaponized something against someone for which they cannot fully be held to account.”

“And you don’t consider that a kindness?”

“I don’t consider myself base enough to allow for such behaviour. I would not tolerate it in anyone else.”

“You tolerate it in Hewlett,” André said. “Tell me why.”

Simcoe remained silent for some time. “Why … does Edmund consider his opinion the only one of significance?”

“Why doesn’t he wish to be with you in any sort of romantic attachment despite your reassurances?” André rephrased.

“Yes,” Simcoe said, uncertain if that was what he had asked.

“You won’t like the answer, and I know you, John - you won’t listen, having already arrived at some assumption or another that spares you from blame,” he sighed. “Hour is up. I’m writing you a prescription for a mild anti-depressant that I want you to take twice daily with -”

“I won’t though. I am sure you ‘know’ that as well.”

“Hewlett still treats you as a child because you persist in your efforts to act like one,” André said, his natural nonchalance abandoning his tone. Simcoe’s shoulders tensed and his fingertips twitched against his thigh. “Pretending for a moment that you had any interest whatsoever in my professional opinion, you need to let him talk about what happened between you when you were at school – that is, you need to listen without falling back into a defence at the assumption that his apologies are another means of chastisement.  Without hearing his – I’ll give you – rather tedious repetition of _‘I’m sorry’_ as _‘I don’t like the person you think I made you’_ , above all because you and I both know that man loves you far more than you are worth.

“Your problem John is that not only are you content to hate yourself but you are happy imagining others do as well. You are not the reason Edmund is leaving America. If anything, you are the reason he would stay, but you can’t stand that level of emotional responsibility. That is why he doesn’t take you seriously in any capacity save for the one you serve captaining our football team. You are afraid of any sort of happiness that doesn’t invite you to embrace the worst aspects of yourself.”

“I want very much to be happy-” Simcoe tried to defend.

“And now that our hour is officially up, so do I,” André said, handing him the prescription and taking out his phone again. “Have you given my offer any thought?”

“You meant that in earnest?”

 

* * *

 

“I take it you have already heard then?” Edmund Hewlett asked as he walked into André’s office and helped himself to the open bottle lazily hidden behind the psychologist’s armchair. The doctor already looked exhausted.

“I, and Rogers, and with any small luck half the team by now.”

“You -” Hewlett stuttered and swallowed, hoping they were not having the same conversation or that he had merely misheard. “You told Robert Rogers what Simcoe and I – I, Sir, I believe that you have put yourself in conflict with the law.”

“My methods are unethical, perhaps, but not illegal,” André said airily. “I incentivised John to settle a bet for me outside of the scope of my practice.”

“What on earth would possess -”

“I thought having it out might incentivise you into action,” he paused. “How long has this been going on between you two, by your own estimations?”

“What ‘this’ are you attempting to define?” Hewlett asked sharply before helping himself to another sip. He liked André, mostly, but found himself considering – not for the first time – that it might be ill advised of him to entrust his mental health to a man who seemed to still be smarting over yesterday’s goalless draw.

“Why don’t you tell me? Or better yet, tell John.”

They had nodded at one another when they had seen each other in the waiting room. It was the closest thing the two had managed to conversation in nearly a week, save for a few profanities exchanged on the pitch. He wondered if Simcoe would be waiting for him in an hour as he always had with the explanation that he had started reading a magazine article prior to his own session and would not want his trip to midtown to be a total waste. It had been a long time since he told that lie, Hewlett realised. He wished to steal time back if only to hear it again used as the prelude to an equally awkward invitation to coffee, dinner, or whatever other activity he would do better to decline.

“I’ve said everything I mean to on the matter,” he said as he sat on the edge of the couch, letting his shoulders slouch. Sometimes he felt the only productive part of therapy was the pretence it provided him to relax his poise and posture. If his racing mind could not be calmed, his ridged spine might. The way André spoke, it hardly seemed worth it.

“You mean you relayed the physical difficulties you have with intimacy to him,” he stated.

“Is there more that needs to be said?”

“John filled a full hour -”

“Good,” Hewlett interrupted. “Then surely you have already heard enough. I have too much going on in my life at present to reduce its stress and sadness to a single mistake. I have made far too many errors of judgement for that. As I should doubt I’ll be speaking of anything but my brief romantic encounter with anyone I know for the next few weeks thanks to your little ‘incentive’, we –ah, you and I, here and now - might do better with my usual topics: grad school, the state of my thesis,” he rallied at an ever quickening pace. “Which, mind you, has not improved in the slightest since our last session. But perhaps that is for the best. When … and more likely _if_ I graduate I’ll be returning to all of the problems I left behind in Great Britain. Naturally, my family still is not speaking to me despite all of my best efforts … but general solitude is more expensive where the public otherwise recognises you.”

André nodded. Hewlett could tell he was not being heard.

“Is solitude synonymous with happiness?”

Happiness? Hewlett wondered if he had ever been listen to at all.

“Why should I ever be _happy_? Simcoe and I talked about this, too and I – I ah, that is I’ve come to the conclusion that I’ll be fine. My telescopes, my books, myself. That is all I need. If I should ever get there – back to that place where it seemed possible, even predestined,” he paused, “None of this was ever planned you realise.”

“New York?”

“No, well … yes – but ah, I suppose I’d rather meant in a broader sense.”

“Then expand.”

“You know the story.”

“I also know that people have a tendency to shift the focus of the narratives they tell themselves about themselves as a means of making sense of the unknown,” André said as he scribbled something in his notes.

“Is that really true?”

“Didn’t you grow up in politics?”

Hewlett laughed. “I suppose there is something to that I – ah. I was referring to Columbia. To St. Andrews. Astrophysics – that is, my entire course of study. As you well know, I was meant to read business at Oxford and I had every intention of putting myself fully into that pursuit at the bequest of my father until,” he stopped. He saw André looking at him expectantly, knowing –or at least suspecting – what was to come.

In his mind, he saw Simcoe as he was as a child, looking not at him but rather to him for some kind of leadership he should have been better prepared to provide. He remembered the ambush and his unforgivable conduct afterwards – heeding the advice of others by attempting to have a frightened child punished for a situation he had all but forced him into - a situation that might have found him dead.

“Even after he returned to school, the kidnapping – my role in it, the whole of it - it kept me up most nights. Truth be told it still does. Which rather lends itself, I suppose, to observing the sky. And. And to solitude. Yet we keep running into each other, John and I. And here I’ve hurt him again. It felt inevitable that I would … and still it is as though my deepest fears are all playing out before me.”

“How?” André knitted his brow, perhaps perplexed by his own ridiculous approach.

“How?” Hewlett gaped. “Christ – do you know what I loathe in the social sciences, André? It is the equivocal nature of your questions. You set no parameters for your search and I am utterly lost and how any of the data you collect from such methods -”

“How do you think you have hurt John?”

“In essence the same way I always do,” Hewlett answered, exasperated – further clarifying by muttering, “I let him take things too far and I did not exact enough authority in my attempts to curtail his impulses.”

“Are you afraid of hurting him, or of your willingness to let him hurt you?”

“He can’t hurt me. Not, not directly, that is. I’ve come to accept my fate -”

“No, forgive me, Edward -”

“It’s Edmund,” Hewlett interjected, forcing a smile to show he would not be victim to such a weak play for power.

“Edmund,” André corrected himself without the curtesy of a mirrored grin. “You haven’t accepted ‘fate’ – I would go so far as to say you don’t even believe in it. It is a theme you have seen repeated in the morally ambiguous mythology you do so enjoy, but it is irrelevant in your interactions.”

“I find your assessment flawed,” Hewlett remarked. “Perhaps that was a poor choice of vocabulary on my behalf, but I don’t harbour fantasies that I should someday acquire all that I lack to such a degree that I could ever provide for the happiness of someone else. I don’t even know it myself.”

“There is a give and take in any relationship. You are brilliant, surprisingly funny, handsome by British standards -”

Hewlett grimaced. He could not agree with any of it. “That’s not -”

“You are decent, compassionate and kind … to everyone but yourself. What is it that you assume fails you?”

“Confidence?” he guessed.

“I’ve never known that to hold you back when you want to move forward. But I don’t think you do. Not with John Simcoe.”

“I don’t. You right,” Hewlett responded dryly.

“Let me try to define the question of ‘why then persist?’ to a physicists liking – you can’t let it go. You could have easily met him as an adult and accepted that he is fine – at least, that he has not internalized his past trauma in the same way you have.”

“’Fine’ is an overstatement – did he happen to mention to you how he forced me to cauterize a cut on his chest – presumably for his twisted amusement or pseudo-sexual satisfaction?”

“No but it fails to surprise me that he would ask or that you would comply with his … request. You let it get that far for a reason and I want to help you figure out what that might be. You could have met him here in New York, seen that he was doing well – at least on the surface levels by which we are all given to judgement,” he paused, “you more than most.”  

“Um-”

“But you didn’t. And you don’t. You keep looking for evidence whenever you are with him that will support your hypothesis that you are beyond absolution. It is easier to look at a problem and say that there is no solution because it contains a certain variable than to seek out an alternative equation – something I am sure you understand from your field all too well. Do you know what my problem with modern physics is, Hewlett? Instead of observing nature, you first look at it algebraically and then attempt to conform physical phenomena to the criteria you have already set. How can you call your field science when it so diverges from the basics that comprise method? I can’t fault you for your approach to your mental well-being, it falls in line with all that you have been trained to do since you were an undergraduate – but I can pose to you observations by means of inquiry.”

Hewlett sighed. That was probably deserved. “Let’s have it then,” he relented.

“You clearly want to be with John – is it because you hope to regain your semblance of authority over him and thus your fundamental sense of self, or, alternatively – is it because you are in love with him? In other words, to what extent does guilt hinder you from something that would clearly make you happy –and from what does it stem? I hope that was … ‘exact’ enough for your liking as a doctoral … candidate.”

“Pardon - love him?” Hewlett rose “Do I love him? How can you even ask? He is everything to me and I have the feeling that I am far more to him. What he does not understand, and I’ll add - what you don’t seem to, is that if we were together – ah, that is to say, in any sort of romantic understanding - we would be reduced to just that. Together. Of course I love him. Far too much, at that, to risk countering ‘together’ with ‘apart.’ And … among a multitude of realities not entirely of my choosing, he hates me for it. And to be perfectly honest I hate myself, and John, though I confess, I love the mess we keep fining ourselves in.”

It took John André a long while and a shot of gin to respond.

 

* * *

 

He found Simcoe in the waiting room, legs folded over a side table, face forced into a magazine he must have pulled at random. Smiling at the semblance of familiarity, he approached, asking with a forced casualty, “Kids?”

“Not yet, but one day I hope,” Simcoe peeped from behind the pages of a parenting periodical.

Hewlett took it from his hands and flipped through the pages. “You are getting ahead of yourself,” he cautioned. “We’ve never actually been on a date.”

“We have,” Simcoe countered, “you are only too proud to admit as much. That said - would you care to join me for dinner? I’ll let you call it what you will. André recommended what sounds like a rather pretentious wine-bar down in Times Square that he thinks you would enjoy.”

“Oh – oh no, Rivington’s? As it works out I’m acquainted with the maître d' … that simply won’t do.”

“Friend of yours?” Simcoe inquired.

“Of Abraham.”

“Somewhere else then? As it happens I have recently – unexpected - come into some money,” he smiled sardonically.

“By ringing Robert Rogers to inform him of our short-lived romantic entanglement?” Hewlett shook his head, “I can’t believe you sold me out like that.”

“Can’t you? If it be any consolation, I am not entirely certain it registered with him. He merely insulted my hair colour and made a threat against my person he cannot possibly expect himself capable of carrying out. It is possible I misheard. For his sake I rather hope I did … it is the accent, I cannot emphasise enough how incoherent the Scots dialect – ”

“You know that I am from Edinburgh?”

“Yes, but do you?” Simcoe squinted. “I just don’t hear it.”

“Ah -”

“I find it as unlikely that Rogers will repeat what I told him in a way that any soul on this side of the Atlantic would understand as I think the possibility of the incident itself enjoying an encore.”

“I wouldn’t be so sure about the latter,” Hewlett said, pulling him up from the armchair into an embrace, adjusting his weight to his tip-toes just enough to peck Simcoe’s cheek.

“You turned down my dinner invitation,” he pouted. Hewlett frowned, hoping Simcoe’s sentiment was not genuine, hating that he could even call that into question.

“No - if would bother yourself to listen - I simply suggested that if you want to drop two-hundred pounds on a meal … I have something better in mind.”

“Let’s hear it.”

“There is a Nando’s in DC right near the airport. We could take a commuter from JFK and be there in a half hour.”

Simcoe lit up. “You … would fly coach … for me?” he teased.

“Coe-ch? Not for you, but for a proper chicken-chain, certainly,” Hewlett replied with equalled sarcasm.

“It may be too soon to say it, but I think I am in love.”

To this, Hewlett only nodded. In their hearts they both knew it was not ‘too soon’, but rather ‘too late’ if there had ever been a time to test these feelings outside the constraints of simple banter. “It was only a friendly, mate,” he jibed as they freed each other from the awkward embrace.

“Two – nil,” Simcoe nodded, not moving to create any distance between them.

Hewlett stared at his own feet, wanting to tell his sometimes-friend everything he felt, wishing for an eloquence fifteen drafts of a letter he would never send told him he did not possess. He took a step back, thinking that while love was easy to conceal and hard to define, happiness might be as simple as this small act of surrender.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Nando’s is a South African chain restaurant that is wicked popular in Great Britain. You remember that cheeky Nando’s meme from way back that no one understood? That was it was about. Getting fast-food chicken. (Not to get philosophical, but …)
> 
> If you want a complete match report of England vs. France from 17.11.2015, [ I got you.](http://www.goal.com/en/match/england-v-france/acf3idm0jbud6azi0t8mqro45)
> 
> Aaaaand … that is it. This was kind of a sad final chapter, but if you have never read Hide and Seek, the end is happy and hopeful. Maybe? Let me know what you thought! Thanks as always for reading.
> 
> MfG – Tav XOXO

**Author's Note:**

> I had not intended to turn this into a WIP or write it at all, if I am being honest. It is based on a scene that was alluded to in chapters thirteen and twenty-five of [Hide and Seek ](http://archiveofourown.org/works/6711946/chapters/15348808), which takes place in early March of the following year and focuses on the direct aftermath of Simcoe losing the corpse of a Republican senator. Not _really_ a romance - and certainly not one between these two – though I can admit I understand why some have found it tempting to read it as such. 
> 
> _Odi et amo_ , or? XD
> 
> Thank you for reading! ~~I am as much a slut for comments and kudos as everyone else you know or have ever read.~~ No but seriously, I do appreciate you for being here and would love to know what you think. XOXO – Tav
> 
> Up Next: Hewlett tries to temper passions with tempered steel ~


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